
Class 'PS - 
Book,^. 



fafflighfT^" I9 60 



COPMRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



X 



I 



REPRESENTATIVE 

SEX'EN LECTIRES 



Ralph \\'aldo E,ncRSor 



W. B. COXKEY COMPAX 
PUBLISlfERS 



36086 



Uibwiry of Gonarese 

Two Co«ES Received 
AUG 18 1900 

Copyright entry 

SECOND COPY. 

Oetivered to 

Of(D£R DIVISION, 
AUG 27 1900 I 



Copyright, 1900, by W. B. Conkky Company. 



68734 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Uses of Great Men 7 

II. Plato; or, the Philosopher 37 

Plato : New Readings 75 

III. Swedenborg ; or, the Mystic 85 

IV. Montaigne ; or, the Skeptic 135 

V. Shakspeare ; or, the Poet .... 167 

VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the World 195 

VII. Goethe ; or, the Writer 227 



C3 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 



I. 

USES OF GREAT MEN. 



e It is natural to believe in great men. If the 
companions of our childhood should turn out 
to be heroes, and their condition regal, it 
would not surprise us. All mythology opens 
with demigods, and the circumstance is high 
and poetic ; that is, their genius is paramount. 
In the legends of the Gautama, the first men 
ate the earth, and found it deliciously sweet. 

Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The 
world is upheld by the veracity of good men : 
they make the earth wholesome. They who 
lived with them found life glad and nutritious. 
I^ife is sweet and tolerable only in our belief 
in such society; and actually, or ideally, we 
manage to live with superiors. We call our 
children and our lands by their names. Their 
names are wrought into the verbs of language,, 
their works and effigies are in our houses, and 
every circumstance of the day recalls an anec- 
dote of them. 

The search after the great is the dream of 
youth, and the most serious occupation of man- 
hood. We travel into foreign parts to find his 
7 



8 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

works, — if possible, to get a glimpse of him. 
But we are put off with fortune instead. You 
say, the English are practical; the Germans 
are hospitable; in Valencia, the climate is 
delicious ; and in the hills of Sacramento there 
is gold for the gathering. Yes, but I do not 
travel to find comfortable, rich, and hospitable 
people, or clear sky, or ingots that cost too 
much. But if there were any magnet that 
would point to the countries and houses where 
are the persons who are intrinsically rich and 
powerful, I would sell all, and buy it, and put 
myself on the road to-day. 

The race goes with us on their credit. The 
knowledge, that in the city is a man who in- 
vented the railroad, raises the credit of all the 
citizens. But enormous populations, if they 
be beggars, are disgusting, like moving cheese, 
like hills of ants, or of fleas — the more, the 
worse. 

Our religion is the love and cherishing of 
these patrons. The gods of fable are the 
shining moments of great men. We run all 
our vessels into one mould. Our colossal theolo- 
gies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahom- 
etism, are the necessary and structural action 
of the human mind. The student of history is 
like a man going into a warehouse to buy 
cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new 
article. If he go to the factory, he shall find 
that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and 
rosettes which are found on the interior walls 
of the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the 
purification of the human mind. Man can 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. • 9 

paint, or make, or think nothing- but man. He 
believes that the great material elements had 
their origin from his thought. And our phi- 
losophy finds one essence collected or distrib- 
uted. 

If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds 
of service we derive from others, let us be 
warned of the danger of modern studies, and 
begin low enough. We must not contend 
against love, or deny the substantial existence 
of other people. I know not what would hap- 
pen to us. We have social strengths. Our 
affection toward others creates a sort of vant- 
age or purchase which nothing will supply. I 
can do that by another which I cannot do 
alone. I can say to you what I cannot first 
say to myself. Other men are lenses through 
which we read our own minds. Each man 
seeks those of different quality from his own, 
and such as are good of their kind ; that is, he 
seeks other men, and the otherest. The 
stronger the nature, the more it is reactive. 
Let us have the quality pure. A little genius 
let us leave alone. A main difference betwixt 
men is, whether they attend their own affair 
or not. Man is that noble endogenous plant 
which grows, like the palm, from within, out- 
ward. His own affair, though impossible to 
others, he can open with celerity and in sport. 
It is easy to sugar to be sweet, and to nitre to 
be salt. We take a great deal of pains to way- 
lay and entrap that which of itself will fall 
into our hands. I count him a great man who 
inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which 



10 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Other men rise with labor and difficulty; he 
has but to open his eyes to see things in a true 
light, and in large relations; whilst they must 
make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant 
eye on many sources of error. His service to 
us is of like sort. It costs a beautiful person 
no exertion to paint her image on our eyes ; 
yet how splendid is that benefit ! It costs no 
more for a wise soul to convey his quality to 
other men. And every one can do his best 
thing easiest — '^ Peu de moyeiis, beaucoup (TeffeC 
He is great who is what he is from nature, and 
who never reminds us of others. 

But he must be related to us, and our life re- 
ceive from him some promise of explanation. 
I cannot tell what I would know ; but I have 
observed there are persons, who, in their char- 
acter and actions, answer questions which I 
have not skill to put. One man answers some 
questions which none of his contemporaries 
put, and is isolated. The past and passing re- 
ligions and philosophies answer some other 
question. Certain men affect us as rich possi- 
bilities, but helpless to themselves and to their 
times, — the sport, perhaps, of some instinct 
that rules in the air ; — they do not speak to our 
want. But the great are near : we know them 
at sight. They satisfy expectation, and fall 
into place. What is good is effective, gener- 
ative ; makes for itself room, food, and allies. 
A sound apple produces seed, — a hybrid does 
not. Is a man in his place, he is constructive, 
fertile, magnetic, inundating armies with his 
purpose, which is thus executed. The river 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 11 

makes its own shores, and each legitimate idea 
makes its own channels and welcome, — ^harvest 
for food, institutions for expression, weapons 
to fight with, and disciples to explain it. The 
true artist has the planet for his pedestal ; the 
adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing 
broader than his own shoes. 

Our common discourse respects two kinds of 
use of service from superior men. Direct giv- 
ing is agreeable to the early belief of men ; 
direct giving of material or metaphysical aid, 
as of health, eternal youth, fine senses, arts of 
healing, magical power, and prophecy. The 
boy believes there is a teacher who can sell 
him wisdom. Churches believe in imputed 
merit. But, in strictness, we are not much 
cognizant of direct serving. Man is endoge- 
nous, and education is his unfolding. The aid 
we have from others is mechanical, compared 
with the discoveries of nature in us. What is 
thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the 
effect remains. Right ethics are central, and 
go from the soul outward. Gift is contrary to 
the law of the universe. Serving others is 
serving us. I must absolve me to myself. 
**Mind thy affair," says the spirit: — * 'coxcomb, 
would you meddle with the skies, or with other 
people?" Indirect service is left. Men have 
a pictorial or representative quality, and serve 
us in the intellect. Behmen and Swedenborg 
saw that things were representative. Men are 
also representative; first, of things, and sec- 
ondly, of ideas. 

"As plants convert the minerals into food for 



12 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

animals, so each man converts some raw ma- 
terial in nature to human use. The inventors 
of fire, electricity, magnetism, iron; lead, 
glass, linen, silk, cotton ; the makers of tools ; 
the inventor of decimal notation; the geom- 
eter ; the engineer ; musician, — severally make 
an easy way for all, through unknown and 
impossible confusions. Each man is, by secret 
liking, connected with some district of nature, 
whose agent; and interpreter he is, as Linnaeus^ 
of plants; Huber, of bees; Fries, of lichens; 
Van Mons, of pears ; Dal ton, of atomic forms ; 
Euclid, of lines ; Newton, of fluxions. 

A man is a center for nature, running out 
threads of relation through everything, fluid 
and solid, material and elemental. The earth 
rolls ; every clod and stone comes to the merid- 
io.n; so every organ, function, acid, crystal, 
grain of dust, has its relation to the brain. It 
waits long, but its turn comes. Each plant 
,has its parasite, and each created thing its 
^ lover and poet. Justice has already been done 
to steam, to iron, to wood, to coal, to load- 
stone, to iodine, to corn, and cotton ; but how 
few materials are yet used by our arts ! The 
mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid 
and expectant. It would seem as if each 
waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy 
tales, for a destined human deliverer. Each 
must be disenchanted, and walk forth to the 
day in human shape. In the history of discov- 
ery, the ripe and latent truth seems to have 
fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet must 
be made man, in some Gilbert, or Sweden- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 13 

borg, or Oersted, before the general mind can 
come to entertain its powers. 

If we limit ourselves to the first advantages; 
— a sober grace adheres to the mineral and 
botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest mo- 
ments, comes up as the charm of nature, — the 
glitter of the spar, the sureness of affinity, the 
veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat 
and cold, hunger and food, sweet and sour, 
solid, liquid, and gas, circle us round in a 
wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable 
quarrel, beguile the day of life. The eye re- 
peats every day the finest eulogy on things — 
**He saw that they were good." We know 
where to find them ; and these performers are 
relished all the more, after a little experience 
of the pretending races. We are entitled, also, 
to higher advantages. Something is \yanting 
to science, until it has been humanized. The 
table of logarithms is one thing, and its vital 
play, in botany, music, optics, and architecture, 
another. There are advancements to numbers, 
anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little sus- 
pected at first, when, by union with intellect 
and will, they ascend into the life, and re- ap- 
pear in conversation, character and politics. 

But this comes later. We speak now only of 
our acquaintance with them in their own 
sphere, and the way in which they seem to fas- 
cinate and draw to them some genius who oc- 
cupies himself with one thing, all his life long. 
The possibility of interpretation lies in the 
identity of the observer with the observed. 
Each material thing has its celestial side ; has 



li REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

its translation, through humanity, into the 
spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays 
a part as indestructible as any other. And to 
these, their ends, all things continually ascend. 
The gases gather to the solid firmament; the 
chemic lump arrives at the plant, and grows; 
arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives 
at the man, and thinks. But also the constit- 
uency determines the vote of the representa- 
tive. He is not only representative, but par- 
ticipant. Like can only be known by like. 
The reason why he knows about them is, that 
he is of them; he has just come out of nature, 
or from being a part of that thing. Animated 
chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc, 
of zinc. Their quality makes this career ; and 
he can variously publish their virtues, because 
they compose him. Man, made of the dust of 
the world, does not forget his origin ; and all 
that is yet inanimate will one day speak and 
reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole 
secret told. Shall we say that quartz moun- 
tains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, 
Von Buchs, and Beaumonts ; and the labora- 
tory of the atmosphere holds in solution I know 
not what Berzeliuses and Davys? 

Thus, we sit by the fire, and take hold on 
the poles of the earth. This quasi omnipres- 
ence supplies the imbecility of our condition. 
In one of those celestial days, when heaven 
and earth meet and adorn each other, it seems 
a poverty that we can only spend it once ; we 
wish for a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, 
that we might celebrate its immense beauty in 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 15 

many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, 
in good faith, we are multiplied by our proxies. 
How easily we adopt their labors ! Every ship 
that comes to America got its chart from Co- 
lumbus. Every novel is debtor to Homer. 
Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane 
borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. 
Life is girt all around with a zodiac of sciences, 
the contributions of men who have perished 
to add their point of light to our sky. Engi- 
neer, broker, jurist, physician, moralist, theolo- 
gian, and every man, inasmuch as he has any 
science, is a definer and map-maker of the 
latitudes and longitudes of our condition. These 
road-makers on every hand enrich us. We 
must extend the area of life, and multiply our 
relations. We are as much gainers by finding 
a new property in the old earth, as by acquir- 
ing a new planet. 

We are too passive in the reception of these 
material or semi-material aids. We must not 
be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step, — 
we are better served through our sympathy. 
Activity is contagious. Looking where others 
look, and conversing with the same things, we 
catch the charm which lured them. Napoleon 
said, *'you must not fight too often with one 
enemy, or you will teach him all your art of 
war." Talk much with any man of vigorous 
mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of 
looking at things in the same light, and, on 
each occurrence, we anticipate his thought. 

Men are helpful through the intellect and the 
affections. Other help, I find a false appear- 



16 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

ance. If you affect to give me bread and fire, 
I perceive that I pay for it the full price, and 
at last it leaves me as it found me, neither bet- 
ter nor worse : but all mental and moral force 
is a positive good. It goes out from you 
whether you will or not, and profits me whom 
you never thought of. I cannot even hear of 
personal vigor of any kind, great power of per- 
formance, without fresh resolution. We are 
emulous of all that man can do. Cecil's say- 
ing of Sir Walter Raleigh, "I know that he can 
toil terribly," is an electric touch. So are 
Clarendon's portraits, — of Hampden; *'who 
was of an industry and vigilance not to be tired 
out or wearied by the most laborious, and of 
parts not to be imposed on by the most subtle 
and sharp, and of a personal courage equal to 
his best parts" — of Falkland; *'who was so se- 
vere an adorer of truth, that he could as easily 
have given himself leave to steal, as to dis- 
semble. " We cannot read Plutarch, without a 
tingling of the blood ; and I accept the saying 
of the Chinese Mencius: "As age is the in- 
structor of a hundred ages. When the manners 
of Loo are heard of, the stupid become intelli- 
gent, and the wavering, determined." 

This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard 
for departed men to touch the quick like our 
own companions, whose names may not last as 
long. What is he whom I never think of? 
whilst in every solitude are those who succor 
our genius, and stimulate us in wonderful man- 
ners. There is a power in love to divine an- 
other's destiny better than that other can, and 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 17 

by heroic encouragements, hold him to his 
task. What has friendship so signaled as its 
sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us? 
We will never more think cheaply of our- 
selves, or of life. We are piqued to some pur- 
pose, and the industry of the diggers on the 
railroad will not again shame us. 

Under this head, too, falls that homage, very 
pure, as I think, which all ranks pay to the 
hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus 
down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster' 
Lamartine. Hear the shouts in the street! 
The people cannot see him enough. They 
delight in a man. Here is a head and a trunk ^ 
What a front! What eyes! Atlantean shoul- 
ders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal 
mward force to guide the great machine ! This 
pleasure^ of full expression to that which, in 
their private experience, is usually cramped 
and obstructed, runs, also, much higher, and 
is the secret of the reader's joy in literary gen- 
lus. Nothing is kept back. There is fire 
enough to fuse the mountain of ore. Shaks- 
peare's principal merit may be conveyed, in 
saying that he, of all men, best understands 
the English language, and can say what he 
will. Yet these unchoked channels and flood- 
gates of expression are only health or fortunate 
constitution Shakspeare's name suggests 
other and purely intellectual benefits. 

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, 
with their medals, swords, and armorial coats,' 
like the addressing to a human being thoughts 
out of a certain height, and presupposing his 

2 Eepresentative Men 



18 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

intelligence. This honor, which is possible in 
personal intercourse scarcely twice in a life- 
time, genius perpetually pays; contented, if 
now and then, in a century, the proffer is ac- 
cepted. The indicators of the values of matter 
are degraded to a sort of cooks and confection- 
ers, on the appearance of the indicators of ideas. 
Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the 
supersensible regions, and draws on their map ; 
and, by acquainting us with new fields of activ- 
ity, cools our affection for the old. These are 
at once accepted as the reality, of which the 
world we have conversed with is the show. 

We go to the gymnasium and the swimming- 
school to see the power and beauty of the bodj^ ; 
there is the like pleasure, and a higher benefit, 
from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; 
as, feats of memory, of mathematical combina- 
tion, great power of abstraction, the transmut- 
ings of the imagination, even versatility, and 
concentration, as these acts expose the invis- 
ible organs and members of the mind, which 
respond, member for member, to the parts of 
the body. For, we thus enter a new gymna- 
sium, and learn to choose men by their truest 
marks, taught, with Plato, *'to choose those 
who can, without aid from the eyes, or any 
other sense, proceed to truth and to being. ' ' 
Foremost among these activities, are the sum- 
mersaults, spells, and resurrections, wrought 
by the imagination. When this wakes, a man 
seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times 
his force. It opens the delicious sense of in- 
determinate size, and inspires an audacious 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 19 

mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of 
gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a 
word dropped in conversation, sets free our 
fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with 
galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the 
Pit. And this benefit is real, because we are 
entitled to these enlargements, and, once hav- 
ing passed the bounds, shall never again be 
quite the miserable pedants we were. 

The high functions of the intellect are so 
allied, that some imaginative power usually 
appears in all eminent minds, even in arithme- 
ticians of the first class, but especially in med- 
itative men of an intuitive habit of thought. 
This class serve us, so that they have the per- 
ception of identity and the perception of reac- 
tion. The eyes of Plato, Shakspeare, Sweden- 
borg, Goethe, never shut on either of these 
laws. The perception of these laws is a kind 
of metre of the mind. Little minds are little, 
through failure to see them. 

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our 
delight in reason degenerates into idolatry of 
the herald. Especially when a mind of power- 
ful method has instructed men, we find the ex- 
amples of oppression. The dominion of Aris- 
totle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of 
Luther, of Bacon, of Locke, — in religion the 
history of hierarchies, of saints, and the sects 
which have taken the name of each founder, 
are in point. Alas! every man is such a victim. 
The imbecility of men is always inviting the 
impudence of power. It is the delight of vul- 
gar talent to dazzle and to bind the beholder. 



20 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

But true genius seeks to defeud us from itself. 
True genius will not impoverish, but will lib- 
erate, and add new senses. If a wise man 
should appear in our village, he would create, 
in those who conversed with him, a new con- 
sciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to 
unobserved advantages; he would establish a 
sense of immovable equality, calm us with 
assurances that we could not be cheated; as 
every one would discern the checks and guar- 
anties of condition. The rich would see their 
mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes 
and their resources. 

But nature brings all this about in due time. 
Rotation is her remedy. The soul is impatient 
of masters, and eager for change. House- 
keepers say of a domestic who has been valu- 
able, "She has lived with me long enough." 
We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms, and 
none of us complete. We touch and go, and 
sip the foam of many lives. Rotation is the 
law of nature. When nature removes a great 
man, people explore the horizon for a successor; 
but none comes and none will. His class is 
extinguished with him. In some other and 
quite different field, the next man will appear; 
not Jefferson, nor Franklin, but now a great 
salesman ; then a road-contractor ; then a stu- 
dent of fishes ; then a buffalo-hunting explorer, 
or a semi-savage western general. Thus we 
make a stand against our rougher masters; but 
against the best there is a finer remedy. The 
power which they communicate is not theirs. 
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 21 

this to Plato, but to the idea, to which, also, 
Plato was debtor. 

I must not forget that we have a special debt 
to a single class. Life is a scale of degrees. 
Between rank and rank of our great men are 
wide intervals. Mankind have, in all ages, 
attached themselves to a few persons, who, 
either by the quality of that idea they embodied, 
or by the largeness of their reception, were en- 
titled to the position of leaders and law-givers. 
These teach us the qualities of primary nature, 
— admit us to the constitution of things. We 
swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and 
are effectually amused with houses and towns 
in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. 
But life is a sincerity. In lucid intervals we 
say, "Let there be an entrance opened for me 
into realities; I have worn the fool's cap too 
long." We will know the meaning of our 
economies and politics. Give us the cipher, 
and, if persons and things are scores of a celes- 
tial music, let us read off the strains. We 
have been cheated of our reason; yet there 
have been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and 
related existence. What they know, they know 
for us. With each new mind, a new secret of 
nature transpires ; nor can the Bible be closed, 
until the last great man is born. These men 
correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make 
us considerate, and engage us to new aims and 
powers. The veneration of mankind selects 
these for the highest place. Witness the mul- 
titude of statues, pictures, and memorials 



22 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

which recall their genius in every city, village, 
house, and ship: — 

"Ever their phantoms arise before us. 
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood ; 
At bed and table they lord it o'er us. 
With looks of beauty, and words of good." 

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of 
ideas, the service rendered by those who intro- 
duce moral truths into the general mind? — I 
am plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual 
tariff of prices. If I work in my garden, and 
prune an apple-tree, I am well enough enter- 
tained, and could continue indefinitely in the 
like occupation. But it comes to mind that a 
day is gone, and I have got this precious noth- 
ing done. I go to Boston or New York, and 
run up and down on my affairs : they are sped, 
but so is the day. I am vexed by the recollec- 
tion of this price I have paid for a trifling 
advantage. I remember the peau cT arte, on 
which whoso sat should have his desire, but a 
piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I 
go to a convention of philanthropists. Do 
what I can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock. 
But if there should appear in the company 
some gentle soul who knows little of persons 
or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who an- 
nounces a law that disposes these particulars, 
and so certifies me of the equity which check- 
mates every false player, bankrupts every self- 
seeker, and apprises me of my independence 
on any conditions of country, or time, or human 
body, that man liberates me ; I forget the clock. 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 23 

I pass out of the sore relation to persons. I 
am healed of my hurts. I am made immortal 
by apprehending my possession of incorruptible 
goods. Here is great competition of rich and 
poor. We live in a market, where is only so 
much wheat, or wool, or land ; and if I have so 
much more, every other must have so much 
less. I seem to have no good, without breach 
of good manners. Nobody is glad in the 
gladness of another, and our system is one of 
war, of an injurious superiority. Every child 
of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be 
first. It is our system ; and a man comes to 
measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, 
and hatreds of his competitors. But in these 
new fields there is room: here are no self- 
esteems, no exclusions. 

I admire great men of all classes, those who 
stand for facts, and for thoughts; I like rough 
and smooth'* Scourges of God," and "Darlings 
of the human race." I like the first Csesar; 
and Charles v., of Spain; and Charles XII., 
of Sweden; Richard Plantagenet; and Bona- 
parte, in France. I applaud a sufficient man, 
an officer, equal to his office ; captains, minis- 
ters, senators. I like a master standing firm 
on legs of iron, well-born, rich, handsome, elo- 
quent, loaded with advantages, drawing all 
men by fascination into tributaries and sup- 
porters of his power. Sword and staff, or tal- 
ents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work 
of the world. But I find him greater, when 
he can abolish himself, and all heroes, by let- 
ting in this element of reason, irrespective of 



24 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

persons ; this subtilizer, and irresistible upward 
force, into our thought, destroying individu- 
alism ; the power so great, that the potentate 
is nothing. Then he is a monarch, who gives 
a constitution to his people; a pontiff, who 
preaches the equality of souls, and releases his 
servants from their barbarous homages ; an 
emperor, who can spare his empire. 

But I intended to specify, with a little minute- 
ness, two or three points of service. Nature 
never spares the opium or nepenthe; but 
wherever she mars her creature with some de- 
formity or defect, lays her poppies plentifully 
on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully 
through life, ignorant of the ruin, and incap'- 
able of seeing it, though all the world point 
their finger at it every day. The worthless >^ 
and offensive members of society, whose exist- 
ence is a social pest, invariably think them- 
selves the most ill-used people alive, and never 
get over their astonishment at the ingratitude 
and selfishness of their contemporaries. Our 
globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in 
heroes and archangels, but in gossips and 
nurses. Is it not a rare contrivance that lodged 
the due inertia in every creature, the conserv- 
ing, resisting energy, the anger at being waked 
or changed? Altogether independent of the 
intellectual force in each, is the pride of opinion, 
the security that we are right. Not the feeb- 
lest grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses 
what spark of perception and faculty is left, to 
chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over 
the absurdities of all the rest. Difference from 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 25 

me is the measure of absurdity. Not one has 

bright thought that made things cohere with 
this bitumen, fastest of cements? But in the 
midst of this chuckle of self-gratulatioA, some 
figure goes by, which Thersites too can love 
and admire. This is he that should marshal 
us the way we were going. There is no end 
to his aid ^ Without Plato, we should almost 
lose our faith m the possibility of a reasonable 
book. We seem to want but one, but we want 
one. We love to associate with heroic persons 
since our receptivity is unlimited; and, with 
the great, our thoughts and manners easily be- 
come great We are all wise in capacity 
though so few in energy. There needs but 
one wise man m a company, and all are wise 
so rapid is the contagion. ' 

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our 
eyes from egotism, and enable us to see other 
people and their works. But there are vices 
and follies incident to whole populations and 
ages. Men resemble their contemporaries 
even more than their projenitors. It is ob- 
served m old couples, or in persons who have 
been housemates for a course of years, that 
they grow alike; and, if they should live long- 
enough, we should not be able to know them 
f ^rf- t: ,, ^^^^^^ abhors these complaisances, 
which threaten to melt the world into a lump 
and hastens to break up such maudlin agglu- 
tmations. The like assimilation goes on be- 
tween men of one town, of one iect, of one 
political party; and the ideas of the time are 



26 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

in the air, and infect all who breathe it. 
Viewed from any high point, the city of New 
York, yonder city of London, the western civ- 
ilization, would seem a bundle of insanities. 
We keep each other in countenance, and exas- 
perate by emulation the frenzy of the time. 
The shield against the stingings of conscience, 
is the universal practice, or our contempo- 
raries. Again ; it is very easy to be as wise 
and good as your companions. We learn of 
our contemporaries, what they know, without 
effort, and almost through the pores of the 
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or, as a wife 
arrives at the intellectual and moral elevations 
of her husband. But we stop where they stop. 
Very hardly can we take another step. The 
great, or such as hold of nature, and transcend 
fashions, by their fidelity to universal ideas, 
are saviors from these federal errors, and defend 
XLS from our contemporaries. They are the 
exceptions which we want, where all grows 
alike. A foreign greatness is the antidote for 
cabalism. 

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh our- 
selves from too much conversation with our 
mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that 
direction in which he leads us. What indem- 
nification is one great man for populations of 
pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a 
genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. 
But a new danger appears in the excess of influ- 
ence of the great man. His attractions warp us 
from our place. We have become underlings 
and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 27 

horizon is our help: — other great men, new 
qualities, counterweights and checks on each 
other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar 
greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last. 
Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he 
said of the good Jesus, even, "I pray you, let 
me never hear that man's name again. ' ' They 
cry up the virtues of George Washington, — 
*'Damn George Washington!" is the poor 
Jacobin's whole speech and confutation. But 
it is human nature's indispensable defense. 
The centripetence augments the centrifugence. 
We balance one man with his opposite, and 
the health of the state depends on the see-saw. 
There is, however, a speedy limit to the use 
of heroes. Every genius is defended from 
approach by quantities of availableness. They 
are very attractive, and seem at a distance our 
own : but we are hindered on all sides from 
approach. The more we are drawn, the more 
we are repelled. There is something not solid 
in the good that is done for us. The best dis- 
covery the discoverer makes for himself. It 
has something unreal for his companion, until 
he too has substantiated it. It seems as if the 
Deity dressed each soul which he sends into 
nature in certain virtues and powers not com- 
municable toother men, and, sending it to per- 
form one more turn through the circle of beings, 
wrote *'Not transferable," and *'Good for this 
trip only," on these garments of the soul. 
There is somewhat deceptive about the inter- 
course of minds. The boundaries are invisible, 
but they are never crossed. There is such 



28 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

good will to impart, and such good will to 
receive, that each threatens to become the 
other ; but the law of individuality collects its 
secret strength : you are you, and I am I, and 
so we remain. 

For Nature wishes every thing to remain 
itself; and, whilst every individual strives to 
grow and exclude, and to exclude and grow, 
to the extremities of the universe, and to impose 
the law of its being on every other creature, 
Nature steadily aims to protect each against 
every other. Each is self-defended. Nothing 
is more marked than the power by which indi- 
viduals are guarded from individuals, in a 
world where every benefactor becomes so easily 
a malefactor, only by continuation of his activ- 
ity into places where it is not due ; where chil- 
dren seem so much at the mercy of their fool- 
ish parents, and where almost all men are too 
social and interfering. We rightly speak of 
the guardian angels of children. How superior 
in their security from infusions of evil persons, 
from vulgarity and second thought ! They shed 
their own abundant beauty on the objects they 
behold. Therefore, they are not at the mercy 
of such poor educators as we adults. If we 
huff and chide them, they soon come not to 
mind it, and get a self-reliance; and if we 
indulge them to folly, they learn the limitation 
elsewhere. 

We need not fear excessive influence. A 
more generous trust is permitted. Serve the 
great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no 
office thou canst render. Be the limb of their 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 29 

body, the breath of their mouth. Compromise 
thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain 
aught wider and nobler? Never mind the 
taunt of Boswellism : the devotion may easily 
be greater than the wretched pride which is 
guarding its own skirts. Be another : not thy- 
self, but a Platonist; not a soul, but a Chris- 
tian ; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian ; not a 
poet, but a Shakspearian. In vain, the wheels 
of tendency will not stop, nor will all the forces 
of inertia, fear, or love itself, hold thee there. 
On, and forever onward! The microscope 
observes a monad or wheel-insect among the 
infusories circulating in water. Presently, a 
dot appears on the animal, which enlarges to 
a slit, and it becomes two perfect animals. 
The ever- proceeding detachment appears not 
less in all thought, and in society. Children 
think they cannot live without their parents. 
But, long before they are aware of it, the 
black dot has appeared, and the detachment 
taken place. Any accident will now reveal to 
them their independence. 

But great men: — the word is injurious. Is 
there caste? is there fate? What becomes of 
the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth 
laments the superfoetation of nature. "Gen- 
erous and handsome," he says, *'is your hero; 
but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country 
is his wheelbarrow ; look at his whole nation 
of Paddies." Why are the masses, from the 
dawn of history down, food for knives and 
powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders, who 
have sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion; 



30 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

and they make war and death sacred; — but 
what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? 
The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. 
It is as real a loss that others should be low, as 
that we should be low ; for we must have society. 

Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say, 
society is a Pestalozzian school ; all are teachers 
and pupils in turn. We are equally served by 
receiving and by imparting. Men who know 
the same things, are not long the best company 
for each other. But bring to each an intelli- 
gent person of another experience, and it is as 
if you let off water from a lake, by cutting a 
lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, 
and great benefit it is to each speaker, as he 
can now paint out his thought to himself. We 
pass very fast, in our personal moods, from 
dignity to dependence. And if any appear 
never to assume the chair, but always to stand 
and serve, it is because we do not see the com- 
pany in a suilficiently long period for the whole 
rotation of parts to come about. As to what 
we call the masses, and common men; — there 
are no common men. All men are at last of 
a size ; and true art is only possible, on the con- 
viction that every talent has its apotheosis 
somewhere. Fair play, and an open field, and 
freshest laurels to all who have won them! 
But heaven reserves an equal scope for every 
creature. Each is uneasy until he has pro- 
duced his private ray unto the concave sphere, 
and beheld his talent also in its last nobility 
and exaltation. 

The heroes of the hour are relatively great : 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 31 

of a faster growth ; or they are such, in whom, 
at the moment of success, a quality is ripe 
which is then in request. Other days will 
demand other qualities. Some rays escape the 
common observer, and want a finely adapted 
eye. Ask the great man if there be none 
greater. His companions are ; and not the less 
great, but the more, that society cannot see 
them. Nature never sends a great man into 
the planet, without confiding the secret to 
another soul. 

One gracious fact emerges from these studies, 
— that there is true ascension in our love. The 
reputations of the nineteenth century will one 
day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The 
genius of humanity is the real subject whose 
biography is written in our annals. We must 
infer much, and supply many chasms in the 
record. The history of the universe is symp- 
tomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in 
all the procession of famous men, is reason or 
illumination, or that essence we were looking 
for; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of 
new possibilities. Could we one day complete 
the immense figure which these flagrant points 
compose ! The study of many individuals leads 
us to an elemental region wherein the individ- 
ual is lost, or wherein all touch by their sum- 
mits. Thought and feeling, that break out 
there, cannot be impounded by any fence of 
personality. This is the key to the power of 
the greatest men, — their spirit diffuses itself. 
A new quality of mind travels by night and by 
day, in concentric circles from its origin, and 



82 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

publishes itself by unknown methods : the union 
of all minds appears intimate : what gets 
admission to one, cannot be kept out of any 
other : the smallest acquisition of truth or of 
energy, in any quarter, is so much good to the 
commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of 
talent and position vanish, when the individ- 
uals are seen in the duration which is necessary 
to complete the career of each ; even more 
swiftly the seeming injustice disappears, when 
we ascend to the central identity of all the 
mdividuals, and know that they are made of 
the same substance which ordaineth and doeth. 
The genius of humanity is the right point of 
view of history. The qualities abide ; the men 
who exhibit them have now more, now less 
and pass away; the qualities remain on another 
brow. No experience is more familiar. Once 
you saw phoenixes: thev are gone; the world 
IS not therefore disenchanted. The vessels on 
which you read sacred emblems turn out to be 
common pottery; but the sense of the pictures 
IS sacred, and you may still read them trans- 
ferred to the walls of the world. For a time, 
our teachers serve us personally, as metres or 
milestones of progress. Once they were angels 
of knowledge, and their figures touched the 
sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, 
culture, and limits; and they yielded their 
places to other geniuses. Happy, if a few 
names remain so high, that we have not been 
able to read them nearer, and age and com- 
parison have not robbed them of a ray. But, 
at last, we shall cease to look in men for com- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 33 

pleteness, and shall content ourselves with their 
social and delegated quality. All that 
respects the individual is temporary and pros- 
pective, like the individual himself, who is 
ascending out of his limits, into a catholic exist- 
ence. We have never come at the true and 
best benefit of any genius, so long as we 
believe him an original force. In the moment 
when he ceases to help us as a cause, he begins 
to help us move as an eifect. Then he appears 
as an exponent of a vaster mind and will. The 
opaque self becomes transparent with the lio-ht 
of the First Cause. ** 

Yet, within the limits of human education 
and agency, we may say, great men exist that 
there may be greater men. The destiny of 
organized nature is amelioration, and who can 
tell its limits? It is for man to tame the chaos • 
on every side, whilst he lives, to scatter the 
seeds of science and of song, that climate, corn 
animals, men, may be milder, and the germs 
of love and benefit may be multiplied. 



3 Representative Men 



^^-^3 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 



35 



II. 

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 

Among books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's 
fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he 
said, *'Burn the libraries; for, their value is in 
this book." These sentences contain the cul- 
ture of nations; these are the corner-stone of 
schools: these are the fountain-head of litera- 
tures. A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, 
taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhetoric, 
ontology, morals, or practical wisdom. There 
was never such range of speculation. Out of 
Plato come all things that are still written and 
debated among men of thought. Great havoc 
makes he among our originalities. We have 
reached the mountain from which all these drift 
bowlders were detached. The Bible of the 
learned for twenty-two hundred years, every 
brisk young man, who says in succession fine 
things to each reluctant generation, — Boethius, 
Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, 
Alfieri, Coleridge,— is some reader of Plato, 
translating into the vernacular, wittily, his 
good things. Even the men of grander pro- 
portion suffer some deduction from the misfor- 
tune (shall I say?) of coming after this exhaust- 
ing generalizer. St. Augustine, Copernicus, 
37 



38 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are 
likewise his debtors, and must say after him. 
For it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer 
with all the particulars deducible from his 
thesis. 

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato, — 
at once the glory and the shame of mankind, 
since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed 
to add any idea to his categories. No wife, no 
children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized 
nations are his posterity, and are tinged with 
his mind. How many great men Nature is 
incessantly sending up out of night, to be his 
men, — Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constel- 
lation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; 
Sir Thomas More, Henr>^ More, John Hales, 
John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, 
Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; 
Marcilius Ficinus, and Picus Mirandola. Cal- 
vinism is in his Phsedo: Christianity is in it. 
Mahometanism draws all its philosophy, in its 
hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, 
from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its 
texts. This citizen of a town in Greece is no 
villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads and 
says, "how English!" a German — "how Teu- 
tonic!" an Italian — "how Roman and how 
Greek !" As they say that Helen of Argos had 
that universal beauty that everybody felt 
related to her, so Plato seems, to a reader 
in New England, an American genius. His 
broad humanity transcends all sectional lines. 
' This range of Plato instructs us what to 
think of the vexed question concerning his re- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 39 

puted works, — what are genuine, what spuri« 
ous. It is singular that wherever we find a 
man higher, by a whole head, than any of his 
contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt, 
what are his real works. Thus, Homer, Plato, 
Raffaelle, Shakspeare. For these men mag- 
netize their contemporaries, so that their com- 
panions can do for them what they can never 
do for themselves; and the great man does 
thus live in several bodies; and write, or paint, 
or act, by many hands ; and after some time, 
it is not easy to say what is the authentic work 
of the master, and what is only of his school. ^ 

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed \^ 
his own times. What is a great man, but one I 
of great affinities, who takes up into himself all 
arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? He 
can spare nothing; he can dispose of every- 
thing. What is not good for virtue^ is good for 
knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax 
him with plagiarism. But the inventor only 
knows how to borrow ; and society is glad to 
forget the innumerable laborers who ministered 
to this architect, and reserves all its gratitude 
for him. When we are praising Plato, it seems 
we are praising quotations from Solon, and 
Sophron, and Philolaus. Be it so. Every book 
is a quotation ; and every house is a quotation 
out of all forests, and mines, and stone quar- 
ries ; and every man is a quotation from all his 
ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts 
all nations under contribution. 

Plato absorbed the learning of his times,^^ 
Philolaus, Timaeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, 



40 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

and what else ; then his master, Socrates ; and 
finding himself still capable of a larger synthe- 
sis, — beyond all example then or since, — he 
traveled into Italy, to gain what Pythagoras 
had for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps 
still further east, to import the other element, 
which Europe wanted, into the European 
mind. This breadth entitles him to stand as 
the representative of philosophy. He says, in 
the Republic, *'Such a genius as philosophers 
must of necessity have, is wont but seldom, in 
all its parts, to meet in one man ; but its differ- 
ent parts generally spring up in different per- 
sons. " Every man, who would do anything 
well, must come to it from a higher ground. A 
philosopher must be more than a philosopher. 
Plato is clothed with the powers of a poet, 
stands upon the highest place of the poet, and 
(though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of 
lyric expression) mainly is not a poet, because 
he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior 
purpose. 

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. 
Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. 
The}^ lived in their writings, and so their house 
and street life was trivial and commonplace. 
If you would know their tastes and complex- 
ions, the most admiring of their readers most 
resembles them. Plato, especially, has no ex- 
ternal biography. If he had lover, wife, or 
children, we hear nothing of them. He ground 
them all into paint. As a good chimney burns 
its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 41 

of all his fortunes into his intellectual perform- 
ances. 

He was born 430 A. C, , about the time of 
the death of Pericles ; was of patrician connec- 
tion in his times and city ; and is said to have 
had an early inclination for war; but in his 
twentieth year, meeting with Socrates, was 
easily dissuaded from this pursuit, and re- 
mained for ten years his scholar, until the 
death of Socrates. He then went to Megara; 
accepted the invitations of Dion and of Diony- 
sius, to the court of Sicily; and went thither 
three times, though very capriciously treated. 
He traveled into Italy; then into Egypt, 
where he stayed a long time ; some say three, 
— some say thirteen years. It is said, he went 
farther, into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Re- 
turning to Athens, he gave lessons, in the 
Academy, to those whom his fame drew 
thither; and died, as we have received it, in 
the act of writing, at eighty-one years. 

But the biography of Plato is interior. We 
are to account for the supreme elevation of this 
man, in the intellectual history of our race, — 
how it happens that, in proportion to the cult- 
ure of men, they become his scholars; that, as 
our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in the 
table-talk and household life of every man and 
woman in the European and American nations, 
so the writings of Plato have pre-occupied every 
school of learning, every lover of thought, 
every church, every poet, — making it impossi- 
ble to think, on certain levels, except through 
him. He stands between the truth and every 



42 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

man's mind, and has almost impressed lan- 
guage, and the primary forms of thought, with 
his name and seal. I am struck, in reading 
him, with the extreme modemness of his style 
and spirit. Here is the germ of that Europe 
we know so well, in its long history of arts 
and arms; here are all its traits, already dis- 
cernible in the mind of Plato, — and in none 
before him. It has spread itself since into a 
hundred histories, but has added no new ele- 
ment. This perpetual modernness is the meas- 
ure of merit, in every work of art; since the 
author of it was not misled by anything short- 
lived or local, but abode by real and abiding 
traits. How Plato came thus to be Europe, 
and philosophy, and almost literature, is the 
problem for us to solve. 

This could not have happened, without a 
sound, sincere, and catholic man, alDle to honor, 
at the same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind, 
and fate, or the order of nature. The first 
period of a nation, as of an individual, is the 
period of unconscious strength. Children cry, 
scream and stamp with fury, unable to express 
their desires. As soon as they can speak and 
tell their want, and the reason of it, they be- 
come gentle. In adult life, whilst the percep- 
tions are obtuse, men and women talk vehe- 
mently and superlatively, blunder and quarrel ; 
their manners are full of desperation; their 
speech is full of oaths. As soon as, with cult- 
ure, things have cleared up a little, and they 
see them no longer in lumps and masses, but 
accurately distributed, they desist from that 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 43 

weak vehemence, and explain their meaning 
in detail. If the tongue had not been framed 
for articulation, man would still be a beast in 
the forest. The same weakness and want, on 
a higher plane, occurs daily in the education of 
ardent young men and women. "Ah! you 
don't understand me; I have never met with 
any one who comprehends me:" and they sigh 
and weep, write verses, and walk alone, — fault 
of power to express their precise meaning. In 
a month or two, through the favor of their good 
genius, they meet some one so related as to 
assist their volcanic estate; and, good commu- 
nication being once established, they are 
thenceforward good citizens. It is ever thus. 
The progress is to accuracy, to skill, to truth, 
from blind force. 

There is a moment, in the history of every 
nation, when, proceeding out of this brute 
youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripe- 
ness, and have not yet become microscopic : so 
that man, at that instant, extends across the 
entire scale ; and, with his feet still planted on 
the immense forces of night, converses, by his 
eyes and brain, with solar and stellar creation. 
That is the moment of adult health, the culmi- 
nation of power. 

Such is the history of Europe, in all points ; 
and such in philosophy. Its early records, 
almost perished, are of the immigrations from 
Asia, bringing with them the dreams of bar- 
barians; a confusion of crude notions of mor- 
als, and of natural philosophy, gradually sub- 



44 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

siding, through the partial insight of single 
teachers. 

Before Pericles, came the Seven Wise Mas^ 
ters ; and we have the beginnings of geometry, 
metaphysics, and ethics: then the partialists, 
— deducing the origin of things from flux or 
water, or from air, or from fire, or from mind. 
All mix with these causes mythologic pictures. 
At last, comes Plato, the distributor, who 
needs no barbaric paint, or tattoo, or whoop- 
ing; for he can define. He leaves with Asia 
the vast and superlative ; he is the arrival of 
accuracy and intelligence. '* He shall be as a 
god to me, who can rightly divide and define." 

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is 
the account which the human mind gives to 
itself of the constitution of the world. Two 
cardinal facts lie forever at the base: the one, 
and the two. — i. Unity, or Identity; and, 2, 
Variety. We unite all things, by perceiving 
the law which pervades them ; by perceiving 
the superficial differences, and the profound 
resemblances. But every mental act, — this 
very perception of identity or oneness, recog- 
nizes the difference of things. Oneness and 
otherness. It is impossible to speak, or to 
think, without embracing both. 

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of 
many effects; then for the cause of that; and 
again the cause, diving still into the profound; 
self-assured that it shall arrive at an absolute 
and sufficient one, — a one that shall be all. 
"In the midst of the sun is the light, in the 
midst of the light is truth, and in the midst of 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 45 

truth is the imperishable being," say the Ve- 
das. All philosophy, of east and west, has the 
same centripetence. Urged by an opposite 
necessity, the mind returns from the one, to 
that which is not one, but other or many ; from 
cause to effect ; and affirms the necessary exis- 
tence of variety, the self-existence of both, as 
each is involved in the other. These strictly- 
blended elements it is the problem of thought 
to separate, and to reconcile. Their existence 
is mutually contradictory and exclusive; and 
each so fast slides into the other, that we can 
never say what is one, and what it is not. The 
Proteus is as nimble in the highest as in the 
lowest grounds, when we contemplate the one, 
the true, the good, — as in the surfaces and ex- 
tremities of matter. 

In all nations, there are minds which incline 
to dwell in the conception of the fundamental 
Unit5\ The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of 
devotion lose all being in one Being. This 
tendency finds its highest expression in the 
religious writings of the East, and chiefly, in 
the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhag- 
avat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana. Those 
writings contain little else than this idea, and 
they rise to pure and sublime strains in cele- 
brating it. 

The Same, the Same ! friend and foe are of 
one stuff ; the ploughman, the plough, and the 
furrow, are of one stuff ; and the stuff is such, 
and so much, that the variations of forms are 
unimportant. "You are fit" (says the supreme 
Krishna to a sage) "to apprehend that you are 



46 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

not distinct from me. That which I am, thou 
art, and that also is this world, with its gods, 
and heroes, and mankind. Men contemplate 
distinctions, because they are stupefied with 
ignorance." "The words I and mine consti- 
tute ignorance. What is the great end of all, 
you shall now learn from me. It is soul, — one 
in all bodies, pervading, uniform, perfect, pre- 
eminent over nature, exempt from birth, 
growth, and decay, omnipresent, made up of 
true knowledge, independent, unconnected with 
unrealities, with name, species, and the rest, 
in time past, present, and to come. The 
knowledge that this spirit, which is essen- 
tially one, is in one's own, and in all other 
bodies, is the wisdom of one who knows the 
unity of things. As one diffusive air, passing 
through the perforations of a flute, is distin- 
guished as the notes of a scale, so the nature 
of the Great Spirit is single, though its forms 
be manifold, arising from the consequences of 
acts. When the difference of the investing 
form, as that of god, or the rest, is destroyed, 
there is no distinction. " *'The whole world is 
but a manifestation of Vishnu, who is identical 
with all things, and is to be regarded by the 
wise, as not differing from, but as the same 
as themselves. I neither am going nor coming ; 
nor is my dwelling in any one place ; nor art 
thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am 
I, I." As if he had said, "All is for the 
soul, and the soul is Vishnu ; and animals and 
stars are transient painting; and light is white- 
wash ; and durations are deceptive ; and form 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 47 

is imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy." 
That which the soul seeks is resolution into 
being, above form, out of Tartarus, and out 
of heaven,— liberation from nature. 

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, 
in which all things are absorbed, action tends 
directly backwards to diversity. The first is 
the course of gravitation of mind; the second 
is the power of nature. Nature is the mani- 
fold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. 
Nature opens and creates. These two princi- 
ples reappear and interpenetrate all things, all 
thought; the one, the many. One is being; 
the other, intellect ; one is necessity ; the other, 
freedom; one, rest; the other, motion; one, 
power; the other, distribution; one, strength; 
the other, pleasure; one, consciousness; the 
other, definition; one, genius; the other, tal- 
ent, one, earnestness; the other, knowledge; 
one, possession; the other, trade; one, caste; 
the other, culture; one king; the other, democ- 
racy; and, if we dare carry these generaliza- 
tions a step higher, and name the last tendency 
of both, we might say, that the end of the one 
is escape from organization, — pure science; 
and the end of the other is the highest instru- 
mentality, or use of means, or executive deity. 

Each student adheres, by temperament and 
by habit, to the first or to the second of these 
gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to 
unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to the 
many. A too rapid unification, and an exces- 
sive appliance to parts and particulars, are the 
twin dangers of speculation. 



48 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

To this partiality the history of nations cor- 
responded. The country of unity, of immov- 
able institutions, the seat of a philosophy de- 
lighting in abstractions, of men faithful in doc- 
trine and in practice to the idea of a deaf, 
unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it 
realizes this fate in the social institution of 
caste. On the other side, the genius of Europe 
is active and creative ; it resists caste by cult- 
ure ; its philosophy was a discipline ; it is a land 
of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the 
East loved infinity, the West delighted in 
boundaries. 

European civility is the triumph of talent, 
the extension of system, the sharpened under- 
standing, adaptive skill, delight in forms, de- 
light in manifestation, in comprehensible re- 
sults. Pericles, Athens, Greece, had been 
working in this element with the joy of genius 
not yet chilled by any foresight of the detri- 
ment of an excess. They saw before them no 
sinister political economy; no ominous Mal- 
thus ; no Paris or London ; no pitiless subdivi- 
sion of classes, — the doom of the pinmakers, 
the doom of the weavers, of dressers, of stock- 
ingers, of carders, of spinners, of colliers; no 
Ireland ; no Indian caste, superinduced by the 
efforts of Europe to throw it off. The under- 
standing was in its health and prime. Art was 
in its splendid novelty. They cut the Penteli- 
can marble as if it were snow, and their per- 
fect works in architecture and sculpture seemed 
things of course, not more difficult than the 
completion of a new ship at the Medford yards, 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 49 

or new mills at Lowell. These things are in 
course, and may be taken for granted. The 
Roman legion, Byzantine legislation, English 
trade, the saloons of Versailles, the cafes of 
Paris, the steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, 
may all be seen in perspective ; the town-meet- 
ing, the ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap 
press. 

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt, and in Eastern^ 
pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in 
which all things are absorbed. The unity of 
Asia, and the detail of Europe ; the infinitude 
of the Asiatic soul, and the defining, result- 
loving,machine-making, surf ace-seeking, opera- 
going Europe, — Plato came to join, and by con- 
tact to enhance the energy of each. The ex- 
cellence of Europe and Asia are in his brain. 
Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed 
the genius of Europe; he substructs the relig- 
ion of Asia, as the base. 

In short, a balanced soul was born, percep- 
tive of the two elements. It is as easy to be 
great as to be small. The reason why we do 
not at once believe in admirable souls, is be- 
cause they are not in our experience. In actual 
life, they are so rare, as to be incredible ; but, 
primarily, there is not only no presumption 
against them, but the strongest presumption 
in favor of their appearance. But whether 
voices were heard in the sky, or not ; whether 
his mother or his father dreamed that the in- 
fant man-child was the son of Apollo ; whether 
a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not; a 
man who could see two sides of a thing was 

4 Bepreeentative Men 



60 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in 
nature ; the upper and the under side of the 
medal of Jove; the union of impossibilities, 
which reappears in every object; its real and 
its ideal power, — was now, also, transferred 
entire to the consciousness of a man. 

The balanced soul came. If he loved ab- 
stract truth, he saved himself by propounding 
the most popular of all principles, the absolute 
good, which rules rulers, and judges the judge. 
If he made transcendental distinctions, he forti- 
fied himself by drawing all his illustrations 
from sources disdained by orators, and polite 
conversers ; from mares and puppies ; from 
pitchers and soup-ladles ; from cooks and criers ; 
the shops of potters, horse-doctors, butchers, 
and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in himself 
a partiality, but is resolved that the two poles 
of thought shall appear in his statement. His 
arguments and his sentences are self-poised and 
spherical. The two poles appear; j^es, and 
become two hands, to grasp and appropriate 
their own. 

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. 
Our strength is transitional, alternating; or, 
shall I say, a thread of two strands. The sea- 
shore, sea seen from shore, shore seen from 
sea; the taste of two metals in contact; and 
our enlarged powers at the approach and at 
the departure of a friend; the experience of 
poetic creativeness, which is not found in stay- 
ing at home, nor yet in traveling, but in tran- 
sitions from one to the other, which must there- 
fore be adroitly managed to present as much 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 51 

transitional surface as possible ; this command 
of two elements must explain the power and 
charm of Plato. Art expresses the one, or the 
same by the different. Thought seeks to know 
unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety; 
that is, always by an object or symbol. Plato 
keeps the two vases, one of sether and one of 
pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both. 
Things added to things, as statistics, civil his- 
tor}^ are inventories. Things used as lan- 
guage are inexhaustibly attractive. Plato 
turns incessantly the obverse and the reverse 
of the medal of Jove. 

To take an example : — The physical philoso- 
phers have sketched each his theory of the 
world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of 
spirit; theories mechanical and chemical in 
their genius. Plato, a master of mxathematics, 
studious of all natural laws and causes, feels 
these, as second causes, to be no theories of the 
world, but bare inventories and lists. To the 
study of nature he therefore prefixes the 
dogma, — "Let us declare the cause which led 
the Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose 
the universe. He was good; and he who is 
good has no kind of envy. Exempt from 
envy, he wished that all things should be as 
much as possible like himself. V/hosoever. 
taught by wise men, shall admit this as the 
prime cause of the origin and foundation of 
the world, will be in the truth. " '*A11 things 
are for the sake of the good, and it is the cause 
of everything beautiful." This dogma ani- 
mates and impersonates his philosophy. 



52 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

The synthesis which makes the character of ' 
his mind appears in all his talents. Where 
there is great compass of wit, we usually find 
excellencies that combine easily in the living 
man, but in description appear incompatible. 
The mind of Plato is not to be exhibited by 
a Chinese catalogue, but is to be apprehended 
by an original mind in the exercise of its origi- 
nal power. In him the freest abandonment is 
united with the precision of a geometer. His 
daring imagination gives him the more solid 
grasp of facts ; as the birds of highest flight . 
have the strongest alar bones. His patrician 
polish, his intrinsic elegance, edged by an 
irony so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, 
adorn the soundest health and strength of 
frame. According to the old sentence, "If 
Jove should descend to the earth, he would 
speak in the style of Plato. ' ' 

With this palatial air, there is, for the direct 
aim of several of his works, and running 
through the tenor of them all, a certain earnest- 
ness, which mounts, in the Republic, and in 
the Phaedo, to piety. He has been charged 
with feigning sickness at the time of the death 
of Socrates. But the anecdotes that have come 
down from the times attest his manly interfer- 
ence before the people in his master's behalf, 
since even the savage cry of the assembly to 
Plato is preserved ; and the indignation towards 
popular government, in many of his pieces, 
expresses a personal exasperation. He has a 
probity, a native reverence for justice and 
honor, and a humanity which makes him ten- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 53 

der for the superstitions of the people. Add 
to this, he believes that poetry, prophecy, and 
the high insight, are from a wisdom of which 
man is not master; that the gods never philoso- ,. 
phize ; but, by a celestial mania, these miracles 
are accomplished. Horsed on these winged 
steeds, he sweeps the dim regions, visits worlds 
which flesh cannot enter; he saw the souls in 
pain ; he hears the doom of the judge ; he be- 
holds the penal metempsychosis; the Fates, 
with the rock and shears ; and hears the intoxi- 
cating hum of their spindle. 

But his circumspection never forsook him. 
One would say, he had read the inscription on 
the gates of Busyrane, — "Be bold;"and on the 
second gate, — "Be bold, be bold and evermore 
be bold;" and then again he paused well at the 
third gate, — "Be not too bold." His strength 
is like the momentum of a falling planet; and 
his discretion, the return of its due and perfect 
curve, — so excellent is his Greek love of bound- 
ary, and his skill in definition. In reading 
logarithms, one is not more secure, than in fol- 
lowing Plato in his flights. Nothing can be 
colder than his head, when the lightnings of 
his imagination are playing in the sky. He 
has finished his thinking, before he brings it to 
the reader; and he abounds in the surprises of 
a literary master. He has that opulence which 
furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon 
he needs. As the rich man wears no more 
garments, drives no more horses, sits in no 
more chambers, than the poor, — but has that 
one dress, or equipage, or instrument, which is 



m REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

fit for the honr and the need; so Plato, in his 
plenty, is never restricted, but has the fit word.. 
There is, indeed, no weapon in all the armory 
of wit which he did not possess and use, — epic, 
analysis, mania, intuition, music, satire, and 
irony, down to the customary and polite. His 
illustrations are poetry and his jests illustra- 
tions. Socrates' profession of obstetric art is 
:good philosophy; and his finding that word 
"'cookery," and "adulatory art," for rhetoric, 
in the Gorgias, does us a substantial service 
still. No orator can measure in effect with 
liim who can give good nicknames. 

What moderation, and understatement, and 
checking his thunder in mid volley! He has 
;good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citi- 
zen with all that can be said against the 
schools. "For philosophy is an elegant thing, 
if any one modestly meddles with it; but, if 
he is conversant with it more than is becoming, 
it corrupts the man. " He could well afford to 
be generous, — he, who from the sunlike cen- 
trality and reach of his vision, had a faith with- 
out cloud. Such as his perception, was his 
speech : he plays with the doubt, and makes 
the most of it: he paints and quibbles; and by 
and by comes a sentence that moves the sea 
and land. The admirable earnest comes not 
only at intervals, in the perfect yes and no 
of the dialogue, but in bursts of light. "I, 
therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these 
accounts, and consider how I may exhibit my 
soul before the judge in a healthy condition. 
Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 55 

men value, and looking to the truth, I shall 
endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I 
can and, when I die, to die so. ) And I invite 
all other men, to the utmost of my power; and 
you, too, I in turn invite to this contest, which, 
I affirm, surpasses all contests here/' 

He is a great average man one who, to the 
best thinking, adds a proportion and equality 
in his faculties, so that men see in him their 
own dreams and glimpses made available, and 
made to pass for what they are. A great com- 
mon sense is his warrant and qualification to 
be the world's interpreter. He has reason, as 
all the philosophic and poetic class have : but 
he has, also, what they have not, — this strong 
solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the 
appearances of the world, and build a bridge 
from the streets of cities to the Atlantis. He 
omits never this graduation, but slopes his 
thought, however picturesque the precipice on 
one side, to an access from the plain. He 
never writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into 
poetic rapture. 

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He 
could prostrate himself on the earth, and cover 
his eyes, whilst he adorned that which cannot 
be numbered, orgaiiged, or known, or named: 
that of which everything can be affirmed and 
denied: that "which is entity and nonentity." 
He called it super-essential. He even stood 
ready, as in the Parmenides, to demonstrate 
that it was so, — that this Being exceeded the 
limits of intellect. No man ever more fully 
acknowledged the Ineffable. Having paid his 



56 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

homage, as for the human race, to the Illimit- 
able, he then stood erect, and for the human 
race affirmed, '*And yet things are knowable!" 
— that is, the Asia in his mind was first heart- 
ily honored, — the ocean of love and power, 
before form, before will, before knowledge, 
the Same, the Good, the One; and now, re- 
freshed and empowered by this worship, the 
instinct of Europe, namely, culture, returns; 
and he cries, Yet things are knowable! They 
are knowable, because, being from one, things 
correspond. There is a scale: and the corres- 
pondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, 
of the part to the whole, is our guide. As 
there is a science of stars, called astronomy; a 
science of quantities called mathematics; a 
science of qualities, called chemistry; so there 
is a science of sciences, — I call it Dialectic, — 
which is the intellect discriminating the false 
and the true. It rests on the observation of 
identity and diversity ; for, to judge, is to unite 
to an object the notion which belongs to it. 
The sciences, even the best, — mathematics, and 
astronomy, are like sportsmen, who seize what- 
ever prey offers, even without being able to 
make any use of them. Dialectic must teach 
the use of them. '*This is of that rank that 
no intellectual man will enter on any study for 
its own sake, but only with a view to advance 
himself in that one sole science which embraces 
all." 

**The essence or peculiarity of man is to com- 
prehend the whole ; or that which in the divers- 
ity of sensations, can be comprised under a 




William Shakspeake. 

Keprerientative Mcu. 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 57 

rational unity." -The soul which has never 
perceived the truth, cannot pass into the human 
torm. " I announce to men the intellect I 
announce the good of being- interpenetrated 
by the mmd that made nature: this benefit 
namely, that it can understand nature, which 
It made and maketh. Nature is good but in- 
tellect is better: as the law-giver is before the 
law-receiver. I give you joy, O sons of men: 
that truth is altogether wholesome; that we 
have hope to search out what might be the 
very self of everything. The misery of man 
IS to be balked of the sight of essence, and to 
be stuffed with conjecture: but the supreme 
good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality 
and all virtue and all felicity depend on this 
science of the real: for courage is nothing else 
than knowledge: the fairest fortune that can 
befall man, is to be guided by his d^mon to 
that which IS truly his own. This also is the 
essence of justice,— to attend every one his 
own ; nay, the notion of virtue is not to be 
arrived at, except through direct contempla- 
tion of the divme essence. Courage, then for 
the persuasion that we must search that which 
we do not know, will render us, beyond com- 
parison, better, braver, and more industrious 
than If we thought it impossible to discover 
what we do not know, and useless to search for 
He secures a position not to be com- 
manded by his passion for reality; valuing 
philosophy only as it is the pleasure of convers^- 
mg with real being. 

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, 



58 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

"Culture. " He saw the institutions of Sparta,\ 
and recognized more genially, one would say, 
than any since, the hope of education. He 
delighted in every accomplishment, in every 
graceful and useful and truthful performance ; 
above all, in the splendors of genius and intel- 
lectual achievement. "The whole of life, O 
Socrates," said Glauco, "is, with the w4se the 
measure of hearing such discourses as these, ' ' 
What a price he sets on the feats of talent, on 
the powers of Pericles, of Isocrates, of Parmen- 
ides! What price, above price on the talents 
themselves! He called the several faculties, 
gods, in his beautiful personation. What value 
he gives to the art of gymnastics in education ; 
what to geometry; what to music, what to 
astronomy, whose appeasing and medicinal 
power he celebrates! In theTimseus, he indi- 
cates the highest employment of the eyes. ' ' By 
us it is asserted, that God invented and be- 
stowed sight on us for this purpose, — that, on 
surveying the circles of intelligence in the 
heavens, we might properly employ those of 
our own minds, which, though disturbed when 
compared with the others that are uniform, are 
still allied to their circulations ; and that, hav- 
ing thus learned, and being naturally possessed 
of a correct reasoning faculty, we might, by 
imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, 
set right our own wanderings and blunders." 
And in the Republic, — "By each of these disci- 
plines, a certain organ of the soul is both puri- 
fied and reanimated, which is blinded and 
buried by studies of another kind; an organ 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 59 

better worth saving than ten thousand eyes, 
since truth is perceived by this alone." 

He said, Culture; but he first admitted its 
basis, and gave immeasurably the first place to 
advantages of nature. His patrician tastes 
laid stress on the distinctions of birth. In the 
doctrine of the organic character and disposi- 
tion is the origin of caste. "Such as were fit 
to govern, into their composition the inform- 
ing Deity mingled gold: into the military, sil- 
ver ; iron and brass for husbandmen and arti- 
ficers. " The East confirms itself, in all ages, 
in this faith. The Koran is explicit on this 
point of caste. "Men have their metal, as of 
gold and silver. Those of you who were the 
worthy ones in the state of ignorance, will be 
the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon 
as you embrace it." Plato was not less firm. 
"Of the five orders of things, only four can be 
taught in the generality of men. ' ' In the 
Republic, he insists on the temperaments of 
the youth, as the first of the first. 

A happier example of the stress laid on 
nature, is in the dialogue with the young 
Theages, who wishes to receive lessons from 
Socrates. Socrates declares that, if some have 
grown wise by associating with him, no thanks 
are due to him ; but, simply, whilst they were 
with him, they grew wise, not because of him ; 
he pretends not to know the way of it. "It is 
adverse to many, nor can those be benefited by 
associating with me, whom the Daemons oppose, 
so that it is not possible for me to live with 
these. With many, however, he does not pre- 



60 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

vent me from conversing, who yet are not at all 
benefited by associating with me. Such, O 
Theages, is the association with me; for, if it 
pleases the God, you will make great and rapid 
proficiency : you will not, if he does not please. 
Judge whether it is not safer to be instructed 
by some one of those who have power over the 
benefit which they impart to men, than by me, 
who benefit or not, just as it may happen. " 
As if he had said, ''I have no system. I can- 
not be answerable for you. You will be what 
you must. If there is love between us, incon- 
ceivably delicious and profitable will our inter- 
course be ; if not, your time is lost, and you 
will only annoy me. I shall seem to you 
stupid, and the reputation I have, false. Quite 
above us, beyond the will of you or me, is this 
secret affinity or repulsion laid. All my good 
is magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but 
by going about my business. " 

He said. Culture; he said. Nature: and he 
failed not to add, "There is also the divine." 
There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly 
tends to convert itself into a power, and organ- 
izes a huge instrumentality of means. Plato, 
lover of limits, loved the illimitable, saw the 
enlargement and nobility which come from 
truth itself, and good itself, and attempted, as 
if on the part of the human intellect, once for 
all, to do it adequate homage, — homage fit for 
the immense soul to receive, and yet homage be- 
coming the intellect to render. He said, then, 
"Our faculties run out into infinity, and return 
to us thence. We can define but a little \vay ; 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 61 

but here is a fact which will not be skipped, and 
which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All 
things are in a scale ; and, begin where we will, 
ascend and ascend. All things are symbolical ; 
and what we call results are beginnings." 

A key to the method and completeness of 
Plato is his twice bisected line. After he has 
illustrated the relation between the absolute 
good and true, and the forms of the intelligible 
world, he says : — '* Let there be a line cut in two 
unequal parts. Cut again each of these two 
parts, — one representing the visible, the other 
the intelligible world, — and these two new 
sections, representing the bright part and the 
dark part of these worlds, you will have, for 
one of the sections of the visible world, — 
images, that is, both shadows and reflections; 
for the other section, the objects of these 
images, — that is, plants, animals, and the 
works of art and nature. Then divide the 
intelligible world in like manner; the one sec- 
tion will be of opinions and hypotheses, and 
the other section, of truths. ' ' To these four 
sections, the four operations of the soul corres- 
pond,— conjecture, faith, understanding, rea- 
son. As every pool reflects the image of the 
sun, so every thought and thing restores us an 
image and creature of the supreme Good. The 
universe is perforated by a million channels for 
his activity. All things mount and mount. 

All his thought has this ascension; in Phse- 
drus, teaching that "beauty is the most lovely 
of all things, exciting hilarity, and shedding 
desire and confidence through the universe, 



62 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

wherever it enters; and it enters, in some 
degree, into all things: but that there is 
another, which is as much more beautiful than 
beauty, as beauty is than chaos; namely, wis- 
dom, which our wonderful organ of sight can- 
not reach unto, but which, could it be seen, 
would ravish us with its perfect reality." He 
has the same regard to it as the source of excel- 
lence in works of art. "When an artificer, in 
the fabrication of any work, looks to that 
which always subsists according to the same ; 
and, employing a model of this kind, expresses 
its idea and power in his work ; it must follow, 
that his production should be beautiful. But 
when he beholds that which is born and dies, 
it will be far from beautiful. ' ' 

Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the 
same spirit, familiar now to all the poetry, 
and to all the sermons of the world, that the 
love of the sexes is initial ; and symbolizes, at 
a distance, the passion of the soul for that 
immense lake of beauty it exists to seek. This 
faith in the Divinity is never out of mind, and 
constitutes the limitation of all his dogmas. 
Body cannot teach wisdom; — God only. In 
the same mind, he constantly affirms that vir- 
tue cannot be taught ; that it is not a science, 
but an inspiration ; that the greatest goods are 
produced to us through mania, and are assigned 
to us by a divine gift. 

This leads me to that central figure, which 
he has established in his Academy, as the organ 
through which every considered opinion shall 
be announced, and whose biography he has like- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 63 

wise so labored, that the historic facts are lost 
in the light of Plato's mind. Socrates and 
Plato are the double star, which the most 
powerful instruments will not entirely separ- 
ate. Socrates, again, in his traits and genius, 
is the best example of that synthesis which 
constitutes Plato's extraordinary power. Soc- 
rates, a man of humble stem, but honest 
enough ; of the commonest history ; of a per- 
sonal homeliness so remarkable, as to be a 
cause of wit in others, — the rather that his 
broad good nature and exquisite taste for a 
joke invited the sally, which was sure to be 
paid. The players personated him on the 
stage; the potters copied his ugly face on their 
stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, adding to 
his humor a perfect temper, and a knowledge 
of his man, be he who he might whom he 
talked with, which laid the companion open to 
certain defeat in any debate, — and in debate he 
immoderately delighted. The young men are 
prodigiously fond of him, and invite him to their 
feasts, whither he goes for conversation. He can 
drink, too; has the strongest head in Athens; 
and, after leaving the whole party under the 
table, goes away, as if nothing had happened, 
to begin new dialogues with somebody that is 
sober. In short, he w^as what our country-people 
call an old one. 

He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, 
was monstrously fond of Athens, hated trees, 
never willingly went beyond the walls, knew 
the old characters, valued the bores and philis- 
tines, thought everything in Athens a little 



64 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

better than anything^ in any other place. He 
was plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, 
affected low phrases, and illustrations from 
cocks and quails, soup-pans and sycamore- 
spoons, grooms and farriers, and unnameable 
offices, — especially if he talked with any super- 
fine person. He had a Franklin-like wisdom. 
Thus, he showed one who was afraid to go on 
foot to Olympia, that it was no more than his 
daily walk within doors, if continuously ex- 
tended, would easily reach. 

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great 
ears, — an immense talker, — the rumor ran, 
that, on one or two occasions, in the war with 
Boeotia, he had shown a determination which 
had covered the retreat of a troop; and there 
was some story that, under cover of folly, he 
had, in the city government, when one day he 
chanced to hold a seat there, evinced a courage 
in opposing singly the popular voice, which 
had well-nigh ruined him. He is very poor; 
but then he is hardy as a soldier, and can live 
on a few olives; usually, in the strictest sense, 
on bread and water, except when entertained 
by his friends. His necessary expenses were 
exceedingly small, and no one could live as he 
did. He wore no undergarment; his upper 
garment was the same for summer and winter; 
and he went barefooted ; and it is said that, to 
procure the pleasure, which he loves, of talking 
at his ease all day with the most elegant and 
cultivated young men, he will now and then 
return to his shop, and carve statues, good or 
bad, for sale. However that be, it is certain 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 65 

that he had grown to delight in nothing else 
than this conversation; and that, under his 
hypocritical pretense of knowing nothing, he 
attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, 
all the fine philosophers of Athens, whether 
natives, or strangers from Asia Minor and the 
islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, 
he is so honest, and really curious to know ; a 
man who was willingly confuted, if he did not 
speak the truth, and who willingly confuted 
others, asserting what w^as false ; and not less 
pleased when confuted than when confuting; 
for he thought not any evil happened to men, 
of such a magnitude as false opinion respecting 
the just and unjust. A pitiless disputant, who 
knows nothing, but the bounds of whose con- 
quering intelligence no man had ever reached ; 
whose temper was imperturbable ; whose dread- 
ful logic was always leisurely and sportive ; so 
careless and ignorant as to disarm the weariest, 
and draw them, in the pleasantest manner, into 
horrible doubts and confusion. But he always 
knew the way out ; knew it, yet would not tell 
it. No escape; he drives them to terrible 
choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hip- 
piases and Gorgiases, with their grand reputa- 
tions, as a boy tosses his balls. The tyrannous 
realist! — Meno has discoursed a thousand 
times, at length, on virtue, before many com- 
panies, and very well, as it appeared to him; 
but, at this moment, he cannot even tell what 
it is, — this cramp-fish of a Socrates has so 
bewitched him. 

This hard-headed humorist, whose strange 

5 Representative Men 



66 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

conceits, drollery, and bo?i-hommie, diverted 
the young patricians, whilst the rumor of his 
sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day, 
turns out, in a sequel, to have a probity 
as invincible as his logic and to be either 
insane, or, at least, under cover of this play, 
enthusiastic in his religion. When accused 
before the judges of subverting the popular 
creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul, 
the future reward and punishment; and, re- 
fusing to recant, in a caprice of the popular 
government, was condemned to die, and sent 
to the prison. Socrates entered the prison, and 
took away all ignominy from the place, which 
could not be a prison, whilst he was there. 
Crito bribed the jailor; but Socrates would not 
go out by treachery. ' ' Whatever inconvenience 
ensue, nothing is to be preferred before justice. 
These things I hear like pipes and drums, 
whose sound makes me deaf to everything you 
say." The fame of this prison, the fame of 
the discourses there, and the drinking of the 
hemlock, are one of the most precious passages 
in the history of the world. 

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of 
the droll and the martyr, the keen street and 
market debater with the sweetest saint known 
to any history at that time, had forcibly struck 
the mind of Plato, so capacious of these con- 
trasts ; and the figure of Socrates, by a neces- 
sity, placed itself in the foreground of the 
scene, as the fittest dispenser of the intellectual 
treasurers he had to communicate. It was a 
rare fortune, that this ^sod of the mob, and 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 67 

this robed scholar, should meet, to make each 
other immortal in their mutual faculty. The 
strange synthesis, in the character of Socrates, 
capped the synthesis in the mind of Plato. 
Moreover, by this means, he was able, in the 
direct way, and without envy, to avail himself 
of the wit and weight of Socrates, to v/hich 
unquestionably his own debt was great; and 
these derived again their principal advantage 
from the perfect art of Plato. 

It remains to say, that the defect of Plato in 
i power is only that which results inevitably 
; from his quality. He is intellectual in his 
aim; and, therefore, in expression, literary. 
I Mounting into heaven, driving into the pit, 
, expounding the laws of the state, the passion 
, of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of the 
j parting soal, — he is literary, and never other- 
\ wise. It is almost the sole deduction from the 
' merit of Plato, that his writings have not, — 
what is, no doubt, incident to this regnancy of 
I intellect in his work, — the vital authority which 
I the screams of prophets and the sermons of 
I unlettered Arabs and Jews possess. There is 
^ an interval ; and to cohesion, contact is neces- 
j sary. 

I I know not what can be said in reply to this 
' criticism, but that we have come to a fact in 
I the nature of things : an oak is not an orange. 
I The qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and 
those of salt, with salt. 

In the second place, he has not a system. 
The dearest defenders and disciples are at 
fault. He attempted a theory of the universe. 



68 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

and his theory is not complete or self-evident 
One man thinks he means this, and another, 
that: he has said one thing in one place, and 
the reverse of it in another place. He is 
charged with having failed to make the transi- 
tion from ideas to matter. Here is the world, 
sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece 
of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a 
mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; 
but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds 
and patches. 

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. 
Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a 
known and accurate expression for the world, 
and it should be accurate. It shall be the 
world passed through the mind of Plato, — 
nothing less. Every atom shall have the Pla- 
tonic tinge ; every atom, every relation or qual- 
ity you knew before, you shall know again and 
find here, but now ordered; not nature, but 
art. And you shall feel that Alexander indeed 
overran, with men and horses, some countries 
of the planet; but countries, and things of 
which countries are made, elements, planet 
itself, laws of planet and of men, have passed 
through this man as bread into his body, and 
become no longer bread, but body: so all this 
mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has 
clapped copyright on the world. This is the 
ambition of individualism. But the mouthful 
proves too large. Boa constrictor has good 
will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad 
in the attempt; and biting, gets strangled: the 
bitten world holds the biter fast by his own 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 69 

teeth. There he perishes : unconquered nature 
lives on, and forgets him. So it fares with all: 
so must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal 
nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical 
exercitations. He argues on this side, and on 
that. The acutest German, the lovingest dis- \ 
ciple, could never tell what Platonism was; ■ 
indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both 
sides of every great question from him. 

These things we are forced to say, if we must 
consider the effort of Plato, or of any philos- 
opher, to dispose of Nature, — which will not be 
disposed of. No power of genius has ever yet 
had the smallest success in explaining exist- 
ence. The perfect enigma remains. But 
there is an injustice in assuming this ambition 
for Plato. Let us not seem to treat with flip- 
pancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion 
to their intellect, have admitted his transcend- 
ent claims. The way to know him, is to com- 
pare him, not with nature, but with other 
men. How many ages have gone by, and he 
remains unapproached ! A chief structure of 
human wit, like Karnac, or the mediaeval 
cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains, it requires 
all the breadth of human faculty to know it. I 
think it is truliest seen, when seen with the 
most respect. His sense deepens, his merits 
multiply, with study. When we say, here is a 
fine collection of fables; or, when we praise 
the style; or the common sense; or arithmetic; 
we speak as boys, and much of our impatient 
criticism of the dialectic, I suspect, is no better. 
The criticism is like our impatience of miles 



70 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

when we are in a hurry ; but it is still best that 
a mile should have seventeen hundred and 
sixty yards. The great-eyed Plato propor- 
tioned the lights and shades after the genius of 
our life. 



^^Kp 



o 



K."^ 



r^ 



PLATO: NEW READINGS, 



71 



PLATO: NEW READINGS. 



The publication, in Mr. Bohn's "Serial 
Library," of the excellent translations of Plato, 
which we esteem one of the chief benefits the 
cheap press has yielded, gives us an occasion 
to take hastily a few more notes of the eleva- 
tion and bearings of this fixed star; or, to add 
a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato at the 
latest dates. 

Modern science, by the extent of its general- 
ization, has learned to indemnify the student 
of man for the defects of individuals, by trac- 
ing growth and ascent in races; and, by the 
simple expedient of lighting up the vast back- 
ground, generates a feeling of complacency 
and hope. The human being has the saurian 
and the plant in his rear. His arts and sci- 
ences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious 
when prospectively beheld from the distant 
brain of ox, crocodile, and fish. It seems as if 
nature, in regarding the geologic night behind 
her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had 
turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, 
Menu, and Columbus, was nowise discontented 
with the result. These samples attested the 
virtue of the tree. These were a clear ameli- 
oration of trilobite and saurus, and a good 
73 



74 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

basis for further proceeding. With this artist 
time and space are cheap, and she is insensible 
of what you say of tedious preparation. She 
waited tranquilly the flowing periods of pale- 
ontology, for the hour to be struck when man 
should arrive. Then periods must pass before 
the motion of the earth can be suspected; then 
before the map of the instincts and the culti- 
vable powers can be drawn. But as of races, 
so the succession of individual men is fatal and 
beautiful, and Plato has the fortune, in the his- 
tory of mankind, to mark an epoch. 

Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, 
or on any masterpieces of the Sociatic reason- 
ing, or on any thesis, as, for example, the im- 
mortality of the soul. He is more than an 
expert, or a school-man, or a geometer, or the 
prophet of a peculiar message. He represents 
the privilege of the intellect, the power, 
namely, of carrying up every fact to successive 
platforms, and so disclosing, in every fact, a 
germ of expansion. These expansions are in 
the essence of thought. The naturalist would 
never help us to them by any discoveries of 
the extent of the universe, but is as poor, when 
cataloguing the resolved nebula of Orion, as 
when measuring the angles of an acre. But 
the Republic of Plato, by these expansions, 
may be said to require, and so to anticipate, 
the astronomy of Laplace. The expansions 
are organic. The mind does not create what 
it perceives, any more than the eye creates 
the rose.^ In ascribing to Plato the merit of 
announcing them, we only say, here was a 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 75 

more complete man, who could apply to nature 
the whole scale of the senses, the understand- 
ing, and the reason. These expansions, or 
extensions, consist in continuing the spiritual 
sight where the horizon falls on our natural 
vision, and, by this second sight, discovering 
the long lines of law which shoot in every 
direction. Everywhere he stands on a path 
which has no end, but runs continuously round 
the universe. Therefore, every word becomes 
an exponent of nature. Whatever he looks upon 
discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses. 
His perception of the generation of contraries, 
of death out of life, and life out of death, — 
that law by which, in nature, decomposition is 
recom position, and putrefaction and cholera 
are only signals of a new creation ; his discern- 
ment of the little in the large, and the large 
in the small; studying the state in the citizen, 
and the citizen in the state; and leaving it 
doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic as 
an allegory on the education of the private 
soul ; his beautiful definitions of ideas, of time, 
of form, of figure, of the line, sometimes h5''po- 
thetically given, as his defining of virtue, cour- 
age, justice, temperance ; his love of the apo- 
logue, and his apologues themselves ; the cave 
of Trophonius ; the ring of Gyges ; the chariot- 
eer and two horses; the golden, silver, brass, 
and iron temperaments ; Theuth and Thamus ; 
and the visions of Hades and the Fates — fables 
which have imprinted themselves in the human 
memory like the signs of the zodiac; his soli- 
form eye and his boniform soul; his doctrine 



76 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

of assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; 
his clear vision of the laws of return, or reac- 
tion, which secure instant justice throughout 
the universe, instanced everywhere, but spe- 
cially in the doctrine, "what comes from God 
to us, returns from us to God," and in Socra- 
tes' belief that the laws below are sisters of the 
laws above. 

More striking examples are his moral conclu- 
sions. Plato affirms the coincidence of science 
and virtue ; for vice can never know itself and 
virtue ; but virtue knows both itself and vice. 
The eye attested that justice was best, as long 
as it was profitable ; Plato affirms that it is pro- 
fitable throughout; that the profit is intrinsic, 
though the just conceal his justice from gods 
and men; that it is better to suffer injustice, 
than to do it; that the sinner ought to covet 
punishment; that the lie was more hurtful 
than homicide; and that ignorance, or the in- 
voluntary lie, was more calamitous than invol- 
untar}^ homicide ; that the soul is unwillingly 
deprived of true opinions; and that no man 
sins willingly; that the order of proceeding of 
nature was from the mind to the body ; and, 
though a sound body cannot restore an unsound 
mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue, render 
the body the best possible. The intelligent 
have a right over the ignorant, namely, the 
right of instructing them. The right punish- 
ment of one out of tune, is to make him play in 
tune; the fine which the good, refusing to gov- 
ern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a 
worse man ; that his guards shall not handle 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 77 

gold and silver, but shall be instructed that 
there is gold and silver in their souls, which 
will make men willing to give them everything 
which they need. This second sight explains 
the stress laid on geometry. He saw that the 
globe of earth was not more lawful and precise 
than was the supersensible; that a celestial 
geometry was in place there, as a logic of lines 
and angles here below; that the world vv^as 
throughout mathematical; the proportions are 
constant of oxygea, azote, and lime; there is 
just so much water, and slate, and magnesia; 
not less are the proportions constant of moral 
elements. 

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and false- 
hood, delighted in revealing the real at the 
base of the accidental; in discovering connec- 
tion, continuity, and representation, every- 
where; hating insulation ; and appears like the 
god of wealth among the cabins of vagabonds, 
opening power and capability in everything he 
touches. Ethical science was new and vacant, 
when Plato could write thus: — "Of all whose 
arguments are left to the men of the present 
time, no one has ever yet condemned injustice, 
or praised justice, otherwise than as respects 
the repute, honors, and emoluments arising 
therefrom ; while, as respects either of them 
in itself, and subsisting by its own power in 
the soul of the possessor, and concealed both 
from gods and men, no one has yet sufficiently 
investigated, either in poetry or prose writ- 
ings, — how, namely, that the one is the great- 



78 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

est of all the evils that the soul has within it, 
and justice the greatest good." 

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, 
permanent, uniform, and self-existent, forever 
discriminating them from the notions of the 
understanding, marks an era in the world. He 
was born to behold the self-evolving power of 
spirit, endless generator of new ends; a 
power which is the key at once to the central- 
ity and the evanescence of things. Plato is so 
centered, that he can well spare all his dogmas. 
Thus the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals 
to him the fact of eternity ; and the doctrine of 
reminiscence he offers as the most probable 
particular explication. Call that fanciful, — it 
matters not; the connection between our 
knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, 
and the explication must be not less magnifi- 
cent. 

He has indicated every eminent point in 
speculation. He wrote on the scale of the 
mind itself, so that all things have symmetry 
in his tablet. He put in all the past, without 
weariness, and descended into detail with a 
courage like that he witnessed in nature. One 
would say, that his forerunners had mapped 
out each a farm, or a district, or an island, in 
intellectual geography, but that Plato first 
drew the sphere. He domesticates the soul in 
nature ; man is the microcosm. All the circles 
of the visible heaven represent as many circles 
in the rational soul. There is no lawless par- 
ticle, and there is nothing casual in the action 
of the human mind. The names of things, too. 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 79 

are fatal, following the nature of things. All 
the gods of the Pantheon are, by their names, 
significant of a profound sense. The gods are 
the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifestation; 
Saturn, the contemplative; Jove, the regal 
soul ; and Mars, passion. Venus is proportion ; 
Calliope, the soul of the world ; Aglaia, inte- 
lectual illustration. 

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had 
appeared often to pious and to poetic souls; 
but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geom- 
eter comes with command, gathers them all up 
into rank and gradation, the Euclid of holiness, 
and marries the two parts of nature. Before 
all men, he saw the intellectual values of the 
moral sentiment. He describes his own ideal, 
when he paints in Timaeus a god leading things 
from disorder into order. He kindled a fire so 
truly in the center, that we see the sphere illu- 
minated, and can distinguish poles, equator, 
and lines of latitude, every arc and node ; a 
theory so averaged, so modulated, that you 
would say, the winds of ages had swept through 
this rhythmic structure, and not that it was 
the brief extempore blotting of one short-lived 
scribe. Hence it has happened that a very 
well-marked class of souls, namely those who 
delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an ethico- 
intellectual expression to every truth by exhib- 
iting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate to 
it, are said to Platonize. Thus, Michel Angelo 
is a Platonist, in his sonnets. Shakspeare is a 
Platonist, when he writes, "Nature is made 



80 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

better by no mean, but nature makes that 
mean," or, 

"He that can endure 
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord, 
Does conquer him that did his master conquer, 
And earns a place in the story." 

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magni- 
tude only of Shakspeare's proper genius that 
hinders him from being classed as the most 
eminent of this school. Swedenborg, through- 
out his prose poem of "Conjugal Love," is a 
Platonist. 

His subtlety commended him to men of 
thought. The secret of his popular success is 
the moral aim, which endeared him to man- 
kind. "Intellect," he said, "is king of heaven 
and of earth;" but, in Plato, intellect is always 
moral. His writings have also the sempiternal 
youth of poetry. For their arguments, most 
of them, might have been couched in sonnets; 
and poetry has never soared higher than in the 
Tima^us and the Phsedrus. As the poet, too, 
he is only contemplative. He did not, like 
Pythagoras, break himself with an institution. 
All his painting in the Republic must be 
esteemed mythical, with intent to bring out, 
sometimes in violent colors, his thought. You 
cannot institute, without peril of charlatan. 

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege 
for the best (which, to make emphatic, he ex- 
pressed by community of women), as the pre- 
mium which he would set on grandeur. There 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 81 

shall be exempts of two kinds : first, those who 
by demerit have put themselves below protec- 
tion, — outlaws; and secondly, those who by 
eminence of nature and desert are out of the 
reach of your rewards ; let such be free of the 
city, and above the law. We confide them to 
themselves; let them do with us as they will. 
Let none presume to measure the irregular- 
ities of Michel Angelo and Socrates by village 
scales. 

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws 
a little mathematical dust in our eyes. I am 
sorry to see him, after such noble superiorities, 
permitting the lie to governors. Plato plays 
Providence a little with the baser sort, as peo- 
ple allow themselves with their dogs and cats. 



6 Representative Men 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 



III. 

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 

Among- eminent persons, those who are most 
dear to men are not the class which the econo- 
mists call producers; they have nothing in 
their hands; they have not cultivated corn, nor 
made bread ; they have not led out a colony, 
nor invented a loom. A higher class, in the 
estimation and love of this city-building, mar- 
ket-going race of mankind, are the poets, who, 
from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought 
and imagination with ideas and pictures which 
raise men out of the world of corn and money, 
and console them for the shortcomings of the 
day, and the meannesses of labor and traffic. 
Then, also, the philosopher has his value, who 
flatters the intellect of this laborer, by engag- 
ing him with subtleties which instruct him in 
new faculties. Others may build cities; he is 
to understand them, and keep them in awe. 
But there is a class who lead us into another 
region, — the world of morals, or of will. What 
is singular about this region of thought, is, its 
claim. Wherever the sentiment of right comes 
in, it takes precedence of everything else. For 
other things, I make poetry of them ; but the 
moral sentiment makes poetry of me. 
85 



86 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

I have sometimes thought that he would 
render the greatest service to modern criti- 
cism, who shall draw the line of relation that 
subsists betweenShakespeare and Swedenborg. 
The human mind stands ever in perplexity, 
demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, im- 
patient equally of each without the other. 
The reconciler has not yet appeared. If we 
tire of the saints, Shakespeare is our city of 
refuge. Yet the instincts presently teach, that 
the problem of essence must take precedence 
of all others, — the questions of Whence? What? 
and Whither? and the solution of these must 
be in a life, and not in a book. A drama or 
poem is a proximate or oblique reply; but 
Moses, Menu, Jesus, work directly on this prob- 
lem. The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a 
region of grandeur which reduces all material 
magnificence to toys, yet opens to every wretch 
that has reason, the doors of the universe. 
Almost with a fierce haste it lays its empire on 
the man. In the language of the Koran, "God 
said, the heaven and the earth, and all that is 
between them, think ye that we created them 
in jest, and that ye shall not return to us?" It 
is the kingdom of the will, and by inspiring 
the will, which is the seat of personality, 
seems to convert the universe into a person : — 

"The realms of being to no other bow, 
Not only all are thine, but all are Thou. ' ' 

All men are commanded by the saint. The 
Koran makes a distinct class of those who are 
by nature good, and whose goodness has an 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 87 

influence on others, and pronounces this class 
to be the aim of creation : the other classes are 
admitted to the feast of being, only as follow- 
ing in the train of this. And the Persian poet 
exclaims to a soul of this kind : 

"Go boldly forth, and feast on being's banquet; 
Thou art the called, — the rest admitted with thee." 

The privilege of this caste is an access to the 
secrets and structure of nature, by some higher 
method than by experience. In common par- 
lance, what one man is said to learn by experi- 
ence, a man of extraordinary sagacity is said, 
without experience, to divine. The Arabians 
say, that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu All 
Seena, the Philosopher, conferred together; 
and, on parting, the philosopher said, "All 
that he sees, I know;" and the mystic said, 
**A11 that he knows, I see. " If one should ask 
the reason of this intuition, the solution would 
lead us into that property which Plato denoted 
as Reminiscence, and which is implied by the 
Bramins in the tenet of Transmigration. The 
soul having been often born, or, as the Hin- 
doos say, "traveling the path of existence 
through thousands of births," having beheld 
the things which are here, those which are in 
heaven, and those which are beneath, there is 
nothing of which she has not gained the know- 
ledge : no wonder that she is able to recollect, 
in regard to any one thing, what formerly 
she knew." "For, all things in nature being 
linked and related, and the soul having hereto- 
fore known all, nothing hinders but that any 



88 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

man who has recalled to mind, or, according 
to the common phrase, has learned one thing 
only, should of himself recover all his ancient 
knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if 
he have but courage, and faint not in the 
midst of his researches. For inquiry and learn- 
ing is reminiscence all." How much more, if 
he that inquires be a holy and godlike soul! 
For, by being assimilated to the original soul, 
by whom, and after whom, all things subsist, 
the soul of man does then easily flow into all 
things, and all things flow into it: they mix: 
and he is present and sympathetic with their 
structure and law. 

This path is difficult, secret, and beset with 
terror. The ancients called it ecstasy or 
absence, — a getting out of their bodies to 
think. All religious history contains traces of 
the trance of saints, — a beatitude, but without 
any sign of joy, earnest, solitar}', even sad; 
*'the flight," Plotinus called it, "of the alone to 
the alone. ' ' The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, 
Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, 
Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. 
But what as readily comes to mind, is the accom- 
paniment of disease. This beatitude comes in 
terror, and with shocks to the mind of the re- 
ceiver. "It o'erinforms the tenement of clay," 
and drives the man mad ; or, gives a certain 
violent bias, which taints his judgment. In 
the chief examples of religious illumination, 
somewhat morbid, has mingled, in spite of the 
unquestionable increase of mental power. 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 89 

Must the highest good drag after it a quality 
which neutralizes and discredits it? — 

"Indeed it takes 
From our achievements, when performed at height, 
The pith and marrow of our attribute." 

Shall we say, that the economical mother dis- 
burses so much earth and so much fire, by 
weight and metre, to make a man, and will not 
add a pennyweight, though a nation is perish- 
ing for a leader? Therefore, the men of 
God purchased their science by folly or pain. 
If you will have pure carbon, carbuncle, or 
diamond, to make the brain transparent, the. 
trunk and organs shall be so much the grosser : 
instead of porcelain, they are potter's earth, 
clay, or mud. 

In modern times, no such remarkable exam- 
ple of this introverted mind has occurred, as 
in Emanuel Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, 
in 1688. This man, who appeared to his con- 
temporaries a visionary, and elixir of moon- 
beams, no doubt led the most real life of any 
man then in the world: and now, when the 
royal and ducal Frederics, Cristierns, and 
Brunswicks, of that day, have slid into obliv- 
ion, he begins to spread himself into the 
minds of thousands. As happens in great men, 
he seemed, by the variety and amount of his 
powers, to be a composition of several persons, 
— like the giant fruits which are matured in 
gardens by the union of four or five single 
blossoms. His frame is on a larger scale, and 
possesses the advantage of size. As it is easier 



90 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

to see the reflection of the great sphere in large 
globes, though defaced by some crack or blem- 
ish, than in drops of water, so men of large 
calibre, though with some eccentricity or mad- 
ness, like Pascal or Newton, help us more than 
balanced mediocre minds. 

His youth and training could not fail to be 
extraordinary. Such a boy could not whistle 
or dance, but goes grubbing into mines and 
mountains, prying into chemistry and optics, 
physiology, mathematics, and astronomy, to 
find images fit for the measure of his versatile 
and capacious brain. He was a scholar from a 
child, and was educated at Upsala. At the 
age of twenty-eight, he was made Assessor of 
the Board of Mines, by Charles XII. In 1716, 
he left home for four years, and visited the 
universities of England, Holland, France, and 
Germany. He performed a notable feat of 
engineering in 17 18, at the siege of Frederics- 
hall, by hauling two galleys, five boats, and a 
sloop, some fourteen English miles overland, 
for the royal service. In 1721 he journeyed 
over Europe, to examine mines and smelting 
works. He published, in 17 16, his Daedalus 
Hyperboreus, and, from this time, for the next 
thirty years, was employed in the composition 
and publication of his scientific works. With 
the like force, he threw himself into theology. 
In 1743, when he was fifty-four years old, 
what is called his illumination began. All his 
metallurgy, and transportation of ships over- 
land, was absorbed into this ecstasy. He 
ceased to publish any more scientific books, 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 91 

withdrew from his practical labors, and de- 
voted himself to the writing and publication of 
his voluminous theological works, which were 
printed at his own expense, or at that of the 
Duke of Brunswick, or other prince, at Dres- 
den, Liepsic, London, or Amsterdam. Later, 
he resigned his office of Assessor: the salary 
attached to this office continued to be paid to 
him during his life. His duties had brought 
him into intimate acquaintance with King 
Charles XIL, by whom he was much consulted 
and honored. The like favor was continued 
to him by his successor. At the Diet of 1751, 
Count Hopken says, the most solid memo- 
rials on finance were from his pen. In 
Sweden, he appears to have attracted a marked 
regard. His rare science and practical skill, 
and the added fame of second sight and extra- 
ordinary religious knowledge and gifts, drew 
to him queens, nobles, clergy, shipmasters, 
and people about the ports through which he 
was wont to pass in his many voyages. The 
clergy interfered a httle with the importation 
and publication of his religious works ; but he 
seems to have kept the friendship of men in 
power. He was never married. He had great 
modesty and gentleness of bearing. His 
habits were simple; he lived on bread, milk, 
and vegetables ; and he lived in a house situated 
in a large garden : he went several times to 
England, where he does not seem to have 
attracted any attention whatever from the 
learned or the eminent ; and died at London, 
March 29, 1772, of apoplexy, in his eighty-fifth 



9*J REPRESEN rATlVK MEN. 

year. Ho is dosoribod, when in London, as a 
man of quiet, clerical habit, not averse to tea 
and cotlee, and kind to children. He wore a 
sword when in full velvet dress, and, whenever 
he walked out, carried a gold-headed cane. 
There is a common portrait of him in antique 
coat and wig. but the face has a wandering or 
vacant air. 

The genius which was to penetrate the 
science oi the age with a far more subtle 
science; to pass the bounds of space and time; 
venture into the dim spirit-realm, and attempt 
to establish a new religion in the world, — be- 
gan its lessons in quarries and forges, in the 
smelting-pot and crucible, in ship-yards and 
dissecting-rooms. No one man is perhaps 
able to judge of the merits of his works on so 
many subjects. One is glad to learn that his 
books on mines and metals are held in the 
highest esteem by those who understand these 
matters. It seems that he anticipated much 
science of the nineteenth century; anticipated, 
in astronomy, the discovery of the seventh 
planet. — but, unhappily, not also of the eighth; 
anticipated the views of modern astronomy in 
regard to the generation of earth by the sun ; 
in magnetism, some important experiments 
and conclusions of later students; in chemistry, 
the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries 
of Schlichting, ^lonro, and Wilson; and first 
demonstrated the office of the lungs. His ex- 
cellent English editor magnanimously lays no 
stress on his discoveries, since he was too 
gTeat to care to be original ; and we are to 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. W 

jud^e, by what he can spare, of v/hat re- 
mains. 

A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his 
times, uncomprehended by them, and requires 
a long local distance to be seen ; suggest, as 
Aristotle, Bacon, Selden, Humboldt, that a 
certain vastness of learning, or quasi omnipres- 
ence of the human soul in nature, is possible. 
His superb speculations, as from a tower, over 
nature and arts, without ever losing sight of 
the texture and sequence of things, almost 
realizes his own picture, in the "Principia, " 
of the original integrity of man. Over and 
above the merit of his particular discoveries, 
is the capital merit of his self-equality. A 
drop of water has the properties of the sea, but 
cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a 
concert, as well as of a flute; strength of a 
host, as well as of a hero; and, in Sweden- 
borg, those who are best acquainted with mod- 
ern books, will most admire the merit of mas*:. 
One of the missouriums and mastodons of liter- 
ature, he is not to be measured by whole col- 
leges of ordinary scholars. His stalwart pres- 
ence would flutter the gov/ns of an university. 
Our books are false by being f ragmentan' ; 
their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of 
natural discourse; childish expressions of sur- 
prise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing 
a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion 
from the order of nature, — being some curi- 
osity or oddity, designedly not in harmony 
with nature, and x^urposely framed to excite a 
surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their 



94 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

means. But Swedenborg is systematic, and 
respective of the world in every sentence; all 
the means are orderly given; his faculties 
work with astronomic punctuality, and this 
admirable writing is pure from all pertness or 
egotism. 

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of 
great ideas. 'Tis hard to say what was his 
own : yet his life was dignified by noblest pic- 
tures of the universe. The robust Aristotel- 
ian method, with its breadth and adequate- 
ness, shaming our sterile and linear logic by 
its genial radiation, conversant with series and 
degree, with effects and ends, skilful to dis- 
criminate power from form, essence from acci- 
dent, and opening by its terminology and defi- 
nition, high roads into nature, had trained a 
race of athletic philosophers. Harvey had 
shown the circulation of the blood ; Gilbert had 
shown that the earth was a magnet ; Descartes, 
taught by Gilbert's magnet, with its vortex, 
spiral, and polarity, had filled Europe with 
the leading thought of vortical motion, as the 
secret of nature. Newton, in the year in 
which Swedenborg was born, published the 
"Principia," and established the universal 
gravity. Malpighi, following the high doc- 
trines of Hippocrates, Leucippus, and Lucre- 
tius, had given emphasis to the dogma that 
nature works in leasts, — ''tota i?i tniiiimis ex- 
istit 7iaturay Unrivalled dissectors, Swam- 
merdam, Leeuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius, 
Heister, Vesalius, Boerhaave, had left nothing 
for scalpel or microscope to reveal in human 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 95 

or comparative anatomy; Linnaeus, his con- 
temporary, was affirming, in his beautiful sci- 
ence, that "Nature is always like herself;" 
and, lastly, the nobility of method, the largest 
application of principles, had been exhibited 
by Leibnitz and Christian Wolff, in cosmology ; 
whilst Locke and Grotius had drawn the moral 
argument. What was left for a genius of the 
largest calibre, but to go over their ground, 
and verify and unite? It is easy to see, in 
these minds, the original of Swedenborg's 
studies, and the suggestion of his problems. 
He had a capacity to entertain and vivify these 
volumes of thought. Yet the proximity of 
these geniuses, one or other of whom had 
introduced all his leading ideas, makes 
Swedenborg another example of the difficulty, 
even in a highly fertile genius, of proving 
originality, the first birth and annunciation of 
one of the laws of nature. 

He named his favorite views, the doctrine of 
Forms, the doctrine of Series and Degrees, the 
doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of Correspond- 
ence. His statement of these doctrines 
deserves to be studied in his books. Not 
every man can read them, but they will reward 
him who can. His theologic works are valu- 
able to illustrate these. His writings would 
be a sufficient library to a lonely and athletic 
student; and the "Economy of the Animal 
Kingdom" is one of those books which, by the 
sustained dignity of thinking, is an honor to 
the human race. He had studied spars and 
metals to some purpose. His varied and solid 



96 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

knowledge makes his style lustrous with points 
and shooting spicula of thought, and resemb- 
ling one of those winter mornings when the 
air sparkles with crystals. The grandeur of 
the topics makes the grandeur of the style. 
He was apt for cosmology, because of that na- 
tive perception of identity which made mere 
size of no account to him. In the atom of 
magnetic iron, he saw the quality which would 
generate the spiral motion of sun and planet. 

The thoughts in which he lived were, the 
universality of each law in nature; the Pla- 
tonic doctrine of the scale or degrees ; the ver- 
sion or conversion of each into other, and so 
the correspondence of all the parts ; the fine 
secret that little explains large, and large, lit- 
tle ; the centrality of man in nature, and the 
connection that subsists throughout all things: 
he saw that the human body was strictly uni- 
versal, or an instrument through which the 
soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter: 
so that he held, in exact antagonism to the 
skeptics, that, "the wiser a man is, the more 
will he be a worshipper of the Deity." In 
short, he was a believer in the Identity-philos- 
ophy, which he held not idly, as the dreamers 
of Berlin or Boston, but which he experimented 
with and established through years of labor, 
with the heart and strength of the rudest Vik- 
ing that his rough Sweden ever sent to battle. 

This theory dates from the oldest philoso- 
phers, and derives perhaps its best illustration 
from the newest. It is this: that nature iter- 
ates her means perpetually on successive 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 97 

planes. In the old aphorism, nature is always 
self-similar. In the plant, the eye or germina- 
tive point opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, 
with a power of transforming the leaf into 
radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or 
seed. The whole art of the plant is still to re- 
peat leaf on leaf without end, the more or less 
of heat, light, moisture, and food, determining 
the form it shall assume. In the animal, 
nature makes a vertebra, or a spine of verte- 
brae, and helps herself still by a new spine, 
with a limited power of modifying its form, — 
spine on spine, to the end of the world. A 
poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that 
a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, 
being an erect line, constitute a right angle ; 
and, between the lines of this mystical quad- 
rant, all animate beings find their place ; and 
he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, or 
the snake, as the type of prediction of the 
spine. Manifestly, at the end of the spine, 
nature puts out smaller spines, as arms ; at the 
end of the arms, new spines, as hands ; at the 
other end, she repeats the process, as legs and 
feet. At the top of the column, she puts out 
another spine, which doubles or loops itself 
over, as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms 
the skull, with extremities again; the hands 
being now the upper jaw, the feet the lower 
jaw, the fingers and toes being represented 
this time by upper and lower teeth. This new 
spine is destined to high uses. It is a new 
man on the shoulders of the last. It can 
almost shed its trunk, and manage to live 

7 Representative Men 



98 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. ' 

alone, according to the Platonic idea in the 
Timaeus. Within it, on a higher plane, all 
that was done in the trunk repeats itself. 
Nature recites her lesson once more in a higher 
mood. The mind is a finer body, and resumes 
its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, 
excluding, and generating, in a new and ethe- 
real element. Here, in the brain, is all the 
process of alimentation repeated, in the acquir- 
ing, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of 
experience. Here again is the mystery of 
generation repeated. In the brain are male 
and female faculties; here is marriage, here is 
fruit. And there is no limit to this ascending 
scale, but series on series. Everything, at the 
end of one use, is taken up into the next, each 
series punctually repeating every organ and 
process of the last. We are adapted to infin- 
ity. We are hard to please, and love nothing 
which ends; and in nature is no end; but 
everything, at the end of one use, is lifted into 
a superior, and the ascent of these things 
climbs into daemonic and celestial natures. 
Creative force, like a musical composer, goes 
on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme 
now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten 
thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth 
and heaven with the chant. 

Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is 
good, but grandeur, when we find chemistry 
only an extension of the law of masses into 
particles, and that the atomic theory shows 
the action of chemistry to be mechanical also. 
Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation, 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 99 

operative also in the mental phenomena; and 
the terrible tabulation of the French statists 
brings every piece of whim and humor to be 
reducible also to exact numerical rations. If 
one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty 
thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grand- 
mother, then, in every twenty thousand, or 
thirty thousand, is found one man who eats 
shoes, or marries his grandmother. What we 
call gravitation, and fancy ultimate, is one fork 
of a mightier stream, for which we have yet 
no name. Astronomy is excellent; but it 
must come up into life to have its full value, 
and not remain there in globes and spaces. 
The globule of blood gyrates around its own 
axis in the human veins, as the planet in the 
sky; and the circles of intellect relate to those 
of the heavens. Each law of nature has the 
like universality; eating, sleep or hybernation, 
rotation, generation, metamorphosis, vortical 
motion, which is seen in eggs as in planets. 
These grand rhymes or returns in nature, — the 
dear, best-known face startling us at every 
turn, under a mask so unexpected that we 
think it the face of a stranger, and, carrying 
up the semblance into divine forms, — delighted 
the prophetic eye of Swedenborg; and he must 
be reckoned a leader in that revolution, which, 
by giving to science an idea, has given to an 
aimless accumulation of experiments, guidance 
and form, and a beating heart, 

I own, with some regret, that his printed 
works amount to about fifty stout octaves, his 
scientific works being about half of the whole 



100 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

number; and it appears that a mass of manu- 
script still unedited remains in the royal library 
at Stockholm. The scientific works have just 
now been translated into English, in an excel- 
lent edition. 

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in 
the ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they re- 
mained from that time neglected; and now, 
after their century is complete, he has at last 
found a pupil in Mr. Wilkinson, in London, a 
philosophic critic, with a co-equal vigor of un- 
derstanding and imagination comparable only 
to Lord Bacon's, who has produced his mas- 
ter's buried books to the day, and transferred 
them, with every advantage, from their forgot- 
ten Latin into English, to go round the world 
in our commercial and conquering tongue. 
This startling reappearance of Swedenborg, 
after a hundred years, in his pupil, is not the 
least remarkable fact in his history. Aided, it 
is said, by the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and 
also by his literary skill, this piece of poetic 
justice is done. The admirable preliminary dis- 
courses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched 
these volumes, throw all the contemporary 
philosophy of England into shade, and leave 
me nothing to say on their proper grounds. 

The *' Animal Kingdom" is a book of won- 
derful merits. It was written with the highest 
end, — to put science and the soul, long es- 
tranged from each other, at one again. It was 
an anatomist's account of the human body, in 
the highest style of poetry. Nothing can ex- 
ceed the bold and brilliant treatment of a sub- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 101 

ject usually so dry and repulsive. He saw 
nature "wreathing through an everlasting 
spiral, with wheels that never dry, on axles 
that never creak," and sometimes sought "to 
uncover those secret recess is where nature is 
sitting at the fires in the depths of her labora- 
tory;" whilst the picture comes recommended 
by the hard fidelity with which it is based on 
practical anatomy. It is remarkable that this 
sublime genius decides, peremptorily for the 
analytic, against the synthetic method; and, 
in a book whose genius is a daring poetic syn- 
thesis, claims to confine himself to a rigid ex- 
perience. 

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature 
and how wise was that old answer of Amasis 
to him who bade him drink up the sea, — "Yes, 
willingly, if you will stop the rivers that flow 
in. " Few knew as much about nature and her 
subtle manners, or expressed more subtly. her 
goings. He thought as large a demand is made 
on our faith by nature, as by miracles. "He 
noted that in her proceeding from first princi- 
ples through her several subordinations, there 
was no state through which she did not pass, 
as if her path lay through all things." "For 
as often as she betakes herself upward from 
visible phenomena, or, in other words, with- 
draws herself inward, she instantly, as it were, 
disappears, while no one knows what has be- 
come of her, or whither she is gone ; so that it 
is necessary to take science as a guide in pur- 
suing her steps. " 

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of 



102 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

an end or final cause, gives wonderful anima- 
tion, a sort of personality to the whole writing. 
This book announces his favorite dogmas. The 
ancient doctrines of Hippocrates, that the 
brain is a gland; and of Leucippus, that the 
atom may be known by the mass ; or, in Plato, 
the macrocosm by the microcosm ; and, in the 
verses of Lucretius, — 

Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis 
Ossibus sic et de pauxilHs atque minutis 
Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari 
Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis ; 
Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse 
Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis ; 
Ignibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse. 

Lib. I. 835. 

" The principle of all things entrails made 
Of smallest entrails ; bone, of smallest bone, 
Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one ; 
Gold, of small grains ; earth, of small sands compacted 
Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted : ' ' 

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim, 
that "nature exists entirely in leasts," — is a 
favorite thought of Swedenborg. "It is a con- 
stant law of the organic body, that large, com- 
pound, or visible forms exist and subsist from 
smaller, simpler, and ultimately from invisible 
forms, which act similarly to the larger ones, 
but more perfectly and more universally, and 
the least forms so perfectly and universally, as 
to involve an idea representative of their entire 
universe. ' ' The unities of each organ are so 
many little organs, homogeneous with their 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 103 

compound; the unities of the tongue are little 
tongues ; those of the stomach, little stomachs ; 
those of the heart are little hearts. This fruit- 
ful idea furnishes a key to every secret. What 
was too small for the eye to detect was read by 
the aggregates; what was too large, by the 
units. There is no end to his application of 
the thought. "Hunger is an aggregate of very 
many little hungers, or losses of blood by the 
little veins all over the body." It is the key 
to his theology, also. "Man is a kind of very 
minute heaven, corresponding to the world of 
spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea 
of man, and every affection, yea, every small- 
est spark of his affection, is an image and effigy 
of him. A spirit may be known from only a 
single thought. God is the grand man." 

The hardihood and thoroughness of his study 
of nature required a theory of forms, also. 
"Forms ascend in order from the lowest to the 
highest. The lowest form is angular, or the 
terrestrial and corporeal. The second and 
next higher form is the circular, which is also 
called the perpetual- angular, because the cir- 
cumference of a circle is a perpetual angle. 
The form above this is the spiral, parent and 
measure of circular forms; its diameters are 
not rectilinear, but variously circular, and 
have a spherical surface for center; therefore 
it is called the perpetual-circular. The form 
above this is the vortical, or perpetual-spiral ; 
next, the perpetual- vortical, or celestial; last, 
the perpetual-celestial, or spiritual." 

Was it strange that a genius so bold should 



104 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

take the last step, also, — conceive that he might 
attain the science of all sciences, to unlock the 
meaning- of the world? In the first volume of 
the '* Animal Kingdom," he broaches the sub- 
ject, in a remarkable note. — 

*'In our doctrine of Representations and Cor- 
respondences, we shall treat of both these sym- 
bolical and typical resemblances, and of the 
astonishing things which occur, I will not say, 
in the living body only, but throughout nature, 
and which correspond so entirely to supreme 
and spiritual things, that one would swear that 
the physical world was purely symbolical of 
the spiritual world; insomuch, that if we choose 
to express any natural truth in physical and 
definite vocalterms, and to convert these terms 
only into the corresponding and spiritual terms, 
we shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth, 
or theological dogma, in place of the physical 
truth or precept; although no mortal would 
have predicted that anything of the kind could 
possibly arise by bare literal transposition ; in- 
asmuch as the one precept, considered sepa- 
rately from the other, appears to have abso- 
lutely no relation to it. I intend, hereafter, to 
communicate a number of examples of such 
correspondences, together with a vocabulary 
containing the terms of spiritual things, as well 
as of the physical things for which they are to 
be substituted. This symbolism pervades the 
living body. " 

The fact, thus explicitly stated, is implied in 
all poetry, in allegory, in fable, in the use of 
emblems, and in the structure of language. 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 105 

Plato knew of it, as is evident from his twice 
bisected line, in the sixth book of the Repub- 
lic. Lord Bacon had found that truth and na- 
ture differed only as seal and print: and he 
instanced some physical proportions, with their 
translation into a moral and political sense. 
Behmen, and all mystics, imply this law in 
their dark riddle-writing-. The poets, in as far 
as they are poets, use it; but it is known to 
them only, as the magnet was known for ages, 
as a toy. Swedenborg first put the fact into a 
detached and scientific statement, because it 
was habitually present to him, and never not 
seen. It was involved, as we explained already, 
in the doctrine of identity and iteration, be- 
cause the mental series exactly tallies with the 
material series. It required an insight that 
could rank things in order and series ; or, rather, 
it required such Tightness of position, that the 
poles of the eye should coincide with the axis 
of the world. The earth has fed its mankind 
through five or six millenniums, and they had 
sciences, religions, philosophies; and yet had 
failed to see the correspondence of meaning- 
between every part and every other part. And, 
down to this hour, literature has no book in 
which the symbolism of things is scientifically 
opened. One would say, that, as soon as men 
had the first hint that every sensible object, — 
animal, rock, river, air, — nay, space and time, 
subsists not for itself, nor finally to a material 
end, but as a picture-language, to tell another 
story of beings and duties, other science would 
be put by, and a science of such grand presage 

8 Ropresoutativn Men 



106 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

would absorb all faculties ; that each man would 
ask of all objects, what they mean : Why does 
the horizon hold me fast, with my joy and 
grief, in this center? Why hear I the same 
sense from countless differing voices, and read 
one never quite expressed fact in endless pic- 
ture-language? Yet, whether it be that these 
things will not be intellectually learned, or, 
that many centuries must elaborate and com- 
pose so rare and opulent a soul, — there is no 
comet, rock-stratum, fossil, fish, quadruped, 
spider, or fungus,, that, for itself, does not in- 
terest more scholars and classifiers than the 
meaning and upshot of the frame of things. 

But Swedenborg was not content with the 
culinary use of the world. In his fifty-fourth 
year, these thoughts held him fast, and his 
profound mind admitted the perilous opinion, 
too frequent in religious history, that he was 
an abnormal person, to whom was granted the 
privilege of conversing with angels and spirits; 
and this ecstasy connected itself with just this 
office of explaining the moral import of the 
sensible world. To a right perception, at once 
broad and minute, of the order of nature, he 
added the comprehension of the moral laws in 
their widest social aspects; but whatever he 
saw, through some excessive determination to 
form, in his constitution, he saw not abstractly, 
but in pictures, heard it in dialogues, con- 
structed it in events. When he attempted to 
announce the law most sanely, he was forced 
to couch it in parable. 

Modern psychology offers no similar example 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 107 

of a deranged balance. The principal powers 
continued to maintain a healthy action ; and, to 
a reader who can make due allowance in the 
report for the reporter's peculiarities, the re- 
sults are still instructive, and a more striking 
testimony to the sublime laws he announced, 
than any that balanced dulness could afford. 
He attempts to give some account of the modus 
of the new state, affirming that "his presence 
in the spiritual world is attended with a certain 
separation, but only as to the intellectual part 
of his mind, not as to the will part;" and he 
affirms that "he sees, with the internal sight, 
the things that are in another life, more clearly 
than he sees the things which are here in the 
world." 

Having adopted the belief that certain books 
of the Old and New Testaments were exact 
allegories, or written in the angelic and ec- 
static mode, he employed his remaining years 
in extricating from the literal, the universal 
sense. He had borrowed from Plato the fine 
fable of "a most ancient people, men better 
than we, and dwelling nigher to the gods;" 
and Swedenborg added, that they used the 
earth symbolically; that these, when they saw 
terrestrial objects, did not think at all about 
them, but only about those which they signi- 
fied. The correspondence between thoughts 
and things henceforward occupied him. "The 
very organic form resembles the end inscribed 
on it." A man is in general, and in particular, 
an organizd justice or injustice, selfishness or 
gratitude. And the cause of this harmony he 



108 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

assigned in the Arcana: *'The reason why all 
and single things, in the heavens and on earth, 
are representative, is because they exist from 
an influx of the Lord, through heaven." This 
design of exhibiting such correspondences, 
which, if adequately executed, would be the 
poem of the world, in which all history and 
science would play an essential part, was nar- 
rowed and defeated by the exclusively theo- 
logic direction which his inquiries took. His 
perception of nature is not human and uni- 
versal, but is mystical and Hebraic. He fas- 
tens each natural object to a theologic notion : 
— a horse signifies carnal understanding; a 
tree, perception ; the moon, faith ; a cat means 
this; an ostrich, that; an artichoke, this other; 
and poorly tethers every symbol to a several 
ecclesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is 
not so easily caught. In nature, each individ- 
ual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each 
particle of matter circulates in turn through 
every system. The central identity enables 
any one symbol to express successively all the 
qualities and shades of the real being. In the 
transmission of the heavenly waters, every 
hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges her- 
self speedily on the hard pedantry that would 
chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every- 
thing must be taken genially, and we must be 
at the top of our condition to understand any- 
thing rightly. 

His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his 
interpretation of nature, and the dictionary of 
symbols is yet to be written. But the inter- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 109 

preter, whom mankind must still expect, will 
find no predecessor who has approached so 
near to the true problem. 

Swedenborg styles himself, in the title-page 
of his books, ''Servant of the Lord Jesus 
Christ;" and by force of intellect, and in effect, 
he is the last Father in the Church, and is not 
likely to have a successor. No wonder that his 
depth of ethical wisdom should give him influ- 
ence as a teacher. To the withered traditional 
church yielding dry catechisms, he let in na- 
ture again, and the worshiper, escaping from 
the vestry of verbs and texts, is surprised to 
find himself a party to the whole of his religion. 
His religion thinks for him, and is of universal 
application. He turns it on every side ; it fits 
every part of life, interprets and dignifies every 
circumstance. Instead of a religion which 
visited him diplomatically three or four times, 
— when he was born, when he married, when 
he fell sick, and when he died, and for the rest 
never interfered with him, — here was a teach- 
ing which accompanied him all day, accom- 
panied him even into sleep and dreams; into 
his thinking, and showed him through what a 
long ancestry his thoughts descend; into soci- 
ety, and showed by what affinities he was girt 
to his equals and his counterparts; into nat- 
ural objects, and showed their origin and mean- 
ing, what are friendly, and what are hurtful; 
and opened the future world, by indicating 
the continuity of the same laws. His disciples 
allege that their intellect is invigorated by the 
study of his books. 



110 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

There is no stich problem for criticism as his 
theological writings, their merits are so com- 
manding ; yet such grave deductions must be 
made. Their immense and sandy diffuseness 
is like the prairie, or the desert, and their in- 
congruities are like the last deliration. He is 
superfluously explanatory, and his feelings of 
the ignorance of men, strangely exaggerated. 
Men take truths of this nature very fast. Yet 
he abounds in assertions; he is a rich discov- 
erer, and of things which most import us to 
know. His thought dvv^ells in essential resem- 
Hances, like the resemblance of a house to 
the man who built it. He saw things in their 
lav7, in likeness of function, not of structure. 
There is an invariable method and order in 
his delivery of his truth, the habitual proceed- 
ing of the mind from inmost to outmost. What 
earnestness and weightiness, — his eye never 
roving, without one swell of vanity, or one look 
to self, in any common form of literary pride ! 
a theoretic or speculative man, but whom no 
practical man in the universe could affect to 
scorn. Plato is a gownsman; his garment, 
though of purple, and almost skywoven, is an 
academic robe, and hinders action with its vol- 
uminous folds. But this mystic is awful to 
Csesar. Lycurgus himself would bow. 

The moral insight of Swedenborg, the cor- 
rection of popular errors, the announcement of 
ethical laws, take him out of comparison with 
any other modern writer, and entitle him to a 
place, vacant for some ages, among the law- 
givers of mankind. That slow but command- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. Ill 

ing influence which he has acquired, like that 
of other religious geniuses, must be excessive 
also, and have its tides, before it subsides into 
a permanent amount. Of course, what is real 
and universal cannot be confined to the circle 
of those who sympathize strictly with his gen- 
ius, but will pass forth into the common stock 
of wise and just thinking. The world has a 
sure chemistry, by which it attracts what is 
excellent in its children, and lets fall the in- 
firmities and limitations of the grandest mind. 
That metempsychosis which is familiar in the 
old mythology of the Greeks, collected in Ovid, 
and in the Indian Transmigration, and is there 
objective, or really takes place in bodies by 
alien will, — in Swedenborg's mind, has a more 
philosophic character. It is subjective, or de- 
pends entirely upon the thought of the person. 
All things in the universe arrange themselves 
to each person anew, according to his ruling 
love. Man is such as his affection and thought 
are. Man is man by virtue of willing, not by 
virtue of knowing and understanding. As he 
is, so he sees. The marriages of the world 
are broken up. Interiors associate all in the 
spiritual world. Whatever the angels looked 
upon was to them celestial. Each Satan 
appears to himself a man ; to those as bad as 
he, a comely man; to the purified, a heap of 
carrion. Nothing can resist states; every- 
thing gravitates; like will to like; what we 
call poetic justice takes effect on the spot. 
We have come into a world which is a living 
poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and 



112 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

beast is not bird and beast, but emanation and 
effluvia of the minds and wills of men there 
present. Every one makes his own house and 
state. The ghosts are tormented with the fear 
of death, and cannot remember that they have 
died. They who are in evil and falsehood are 
afraid of all others. Such as have deprived 
themselves of charity, wander and flee; the 
societies which they approach discover their 
quality, and drive them away. The covetous 
seem to themselves to be abiding- in cells where 
their money is deposited, and these to be in- 
fested with mice. They who place merit in 
good works seem to themselves to cut wood. 
**I asked such, if they were not wearied? They 
replied, that they have not yet done work 
eno^igh to merit heaven." 

He delivers golden sayings, which express 
with singular beauty the ethical laws; as when 
he uttered that famed sentence, that, "in 
heaven the angels are advancing continually 
to the springtime of their youth, so that the 
oldest angel appears the youngest:" "The 
more angels, the more room:" "The perfec- 
tion of man is the love of use:" "Man, in his 
perfect form, is heaven:" "What is from 
Him, is Him:" "Ends always ascend as 
nature descends:" And the truly poetic 
account of the writing in the inmost heaven, 
which, as it consists of inflexions according to 
the form of heaven, can be read without in- 
struction He almost justifies his claim to pre- 
ternatural vision, by strange insights of the 
structure of the human body and mind. "It 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 113 

is never permitted to any one, in heaven, to 
stand behind another and look at the back of 
his head ; for then the influx which is from the 
Lord is disturbed." The angels, from the 
sound of the voice, know a man's love; from 
the articulation of the sound, his wisdom ; and 
from the sense of the words, his science. 

In the ''Conjugal Love," he has unfolded 
the science of marriage. Of this book, one 
would say, that, with the highest elements, it 
has failed of success. It came near to be the 
Hymn of Love, which Plato attempted in the 
''Banquet;" the love, which, Dante says, 
Casella sang among the angels in Paradise; 
and which, as rightly celebrated, in its genesis, 
fruition, and effect, might well entrance the 
souls, as it would lay open the genesis of all 
institutions, customs, and manners. The book 
had been grand, if the Hebraism had been 
omitted, and the law stated without Gothicism, 
as ethics, and with that scope for ascension of 
state which the nature of things requires. It 
is a fine Platonic development of the science of 
marriage ; teaching that sex is universal, and 
not local ; virility in the male qualifying every 
organ, act, and thought; and the feminine in 
woman. Therefore, in the real or spiritual 
world, the nuptial union is not momentary, 
but incessant and total; and chastit}^ not a 
local, but a universal virtue; unchastity being 
discovered as much in the trading, or planting, 
or speaking, or philosophizing, as in genera- 
tion ; and that, though the virgins he saw in 
heaven were beautiful, the wives were incom- 



114 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

parably more beautiful, and went on increasing 
in beauty evermore. 

Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his 
theory to a temporary form. He exaggerates 
the circumstance of marriage; and, though 
he finds false marriages on the earth, fancies a 
wiser choice in heaven. But of progressive 
souls, all loves and friendships are momentary. 
Do you love me? means, Do you see the same 
truth? If you do, we are happy with the same 
happiness ; but presently one of us passes into 
the perception of new truth ; — we are divorced, 
and no tension in nature can hold us to each 
other. I know how delicious is this cup of 
love, — I existing for you, you existing for me ; 
but it is a child's clinging to his toy; an 
attempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial 
chamber; to keep the picture-alphabet through 
which our first lessons are prettily conveyed. 
The Eden of God is bare and grand: like the 
outdoor landscape, remembered from the eve- 
ning fireside, it seems cold and desolate, whilst 
you cower over the coals; but, once abroad 
again, we pity those who can forego the mag- 
nificence of nature, for candle-light and cards. 
Perhaps the true subject of the "Conjugal 
Love" is conversation, whose laws are pro- 
foundly eliminated. It is false, if literally 
applied to marriage. For God is the bride or 
bridegroom of the soul. Heaven is not the 
pairing of two, but the communion of all souls. 
We meet, and dwell an instant under the tem- 
ple of one thought, and part as though we 
parted not, to join another thought in other 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 115 

fellowships of joy. So far from there being 
anything divine in the low and proprietary 
sense of, Do you love me? it is only when you 
leave and lose me, by casting yourself on a 
sentiment which is higher than both of us, that 
I draw near, and find myself at your side; and 
I am repelled, if you fix your eye on me, and 
demand love. In fact, in the spiritual world, 
we change sexes every moment. You love 
the worth in me; then I am your husband: 
but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes the 
love ; and that worth is a drop of the ocean of 
worth that is beyond me. Meantime, I adore 
the greater worth in another, and so become 
his wife. He aspires to a higher worth in 
another spirit, and is wife of receiver of that 
influence. 

Whether a self-inquisitorial habit, that he 
grew into, from jealousy of the sins to which 
men of thought are liable, he has acquired, in 
disentangling and demonstrating that particu- 
lar form of moral disease, an acumen which no 
conscience can resist, I refer to his feeling of 
the profanation of thinking to what is good 
"from scientifics." *'To reason about faith, is 
to doubt and deny. ' ' He was painfully alive to 
the difference between knowing and doing, 
and this sensibility is incessantly expressed. 
Philosophers are, therefore, vipers, cocka- 
trices, asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying 
serpents ; literary men are conjurers and char- 
latans. 

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, 
that here we find the seat of his own pain. Pos- 



116 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

sibly Swedenborg paid the penalty of intro- 
verted faculties. Success, or a fortunate 
genius, seems to depend on a happy adjust- 
ment of heart and brain ; on a due proportion, 
hard to hit, of moral and mental power, which, 
perhaps, obeys the law of those chemical ratios 
which make a proportion in volumes necessary 
to combination, as when gases will combine in 
certain fixed rates, but not at any rate. It is 
hard to carry a full cup: and this man, pro- 
fusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell 
into dangerous discord with him^self. In his 
Animal Kingdom, he surprises us, by declaring 
that he loved analysis, and not synthesis; and 
now, after his fiftieth year, he falls into jeal- 
ousy of his intellect; and, though aware that 
truth is not solitary, nor is goodness solitary, 
but both must ever mix and marry, he makes 
war on his mind, takes the part of the con- 
science against it, and, on all occasions, tra- 
duces and blasphemes it. The violence is in- 
stantly avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love is 
unlovely, when truth, the half part of heaven, 
is denied, as much as when a bitterness in men 
of talent leads to satire, and destroys the judg- 
ment. He is wise, but wise in his own de- 
spite. There is an air of infinite grief, and 
the sound of wailing, all over and through this 
lurid universe. A vampyre sits in the seat of 
the prophet, and turns with gloomy appetite 
to the images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not 
more readily weave its nest, or a mole bore into 
the ground, than this seer of souls substructs a 
new hell and pit, each more abominable than 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 117 

the last, round every new crew of offenders. 
He was let down through a column that seemed 
of brass, but it was formed of angelic spirits, 
that he might descend safely amongst the un- 
happy, and witness the vastation of souls ; and 
heard there, for a long continuance, their 
lamentations; he saw their tormentors, who 
increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw 
the hell of the jugglers, the hell of the assas- 
sins, the hell of the lascivious ; the hell of rob- 
bers, who kill and boil men ; the infernal tun 
of the deceitful; the excrementitious hells; 
the hell of the revengeful, whose faces resem- 
bled a round, broad- cake, and their arms ro- 
tate like a wheel. Except Rabelais and Dean 
Swift, nobody ever had such science of filth 
and corruption. 

These books should be used with caution. 
It is dangerous to sculpture these evanescino^ 
images of thought. True in transition, they 
become false if fixed. It requires, for his just 
apprehension, almost a genius equal to his 
own. But when his visions become the stereo- 
typed language of multitudes of persons, of all 
degrees of age and capacity, they are per- 
verted. The wise people of the Greek race 
were accustomed to lead the most intelligent 
and virtuous young men, as part of their edu- 
cation, through the Eleusinian mysteries, 
wherein, with much pomp and graduation, the 
highest truths known to ancient wisdom were 
taught. An ardent and contemplative young 
man, at eighteen or twenty years, might read 
once these books of Swedenborg, these myste- 



118 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

ries of love and conscience, and then throw them 
aside forever. Genius is ever haunted by- 
similar dreams, when the hells and the heavens 
are opened to it. But these pictures are to be 
held as mystical, that is, as a quite arbitrary 
and accidental picture of the truth — not as the 
truth. Any other symbol would be as good : 
then this is safely seen. 

Swedenborg's system of the world wants cen- 
tral spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital, and 
lacks power to generate life. There is no in- 
dividual in it. The universe is a gigantic crys- 
tal, all those atoms and laminae lie in uninter- 
rupted order, and with unbroken unity, but 
cold and still. What seems an individual and 
a will, is none. There is an immense chain of 
intermediation, extending from center to ex- 
tremes, which bereaves every agency of all 
freedom and character. The universe, in his 
poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only 
reflects the mind of the magnetizer. Every 
thought comes into each mind by influence 
from a society of spirits that surround it, and 
into these from a higher society, and so on. 
All his types mean the same few things. All 
his figures speak one speech. All his inter- 
locutors Swedenborgize. Be they who they 
may, to this complexion must they come at 
last. This Charon ferries them all over in his 
boat; kings, counselors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir 
Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George 
II., Mahomet, or whosoever, and all gather 
one grimness of hue and style. Only when 
Cicero comes by, our gentle seer sticks a little 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 119 

at saying^ he talked with Cicero, and, with a 
touch of human relenting, remarks, '*one whom 
it was given me to believe was Cicero;" and 
when the soi disant Roman opens his mouth, 
Rome and eloquence have ebbed away, — it is 
plain theologic Swedenborg, like the rest. His 
heavens and hells are dull; fault of want of 
individualism. The thousand-fold relation of 
men is not there. The interest that attaches 
in nature to each man, because he is right by 
his wrong, and wrong by his right, because he 
defies all dogmatizing and classification, so 
many allowances, and contingencies, and futu- 
rities, are to be taken into account, strong by 
his vices, often paralyzed by his virtues, — sinks 
into entire sympathy with his society. This 
want reacts to the center of the system. 
Though the agency of ''the Lord" is in every 
line referred to by name, it never becomes alive. 
There is no lustre in that eye which gazes from 
the center, and which should vivify the im- 
mense dependency of beings. 

The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theo- 
logic determination. Nothing with him has 
the liberality of universal wisdom, but we are 
always in a church. That Hebrew muse, 
which taught the lore of right and wrong to 
man, had the same excess of influence for him, 
it has had for the nations. The mode, as well 
as the essence, was sacred. Palestine is ever 
the more valuable as a chapter in universal his- 
tory, and ever the less an available element in 
education. The genius of Swedenborg, largest 
of all modern souls in this department of 



120 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

thought, wasted itself in the endeavor to reani- 
mate and conserve what had already arrived at 
its natural term, and, in the great secular 
Providence, was retiring from its prominence, 
before western modes of thought and expres- 
sion. Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by 
attaching themselves to the Christian symbol, 
instead of to the moral sentiment, which car- 
ries innumerable Christianities, humanities, 
divinities, in its bosom. 

The excess of influence shows itself in the 
incongruous importation of a foreign rhetoric. 
*'WhaL have I to do," asks the impatient 
reader, "with jasper and sardonyx, beryl and 
chalcedony; what with arks and passovers, 
ephahs and ephods; what with lepers and 
emerods; what with heave-offerinors and un- 
leavened bread; chariots of fire, dragons 
crowned and horned, behemoth and unicorn? 
Good for orientals, these are nothing to me. 
The more learning you bring to explain them, 
the more glaring the impertinence. The more 
coherent and elaborate the system, the less I 
like it. I say, with the Spartan, 'Why do you 
speak so much to the purpose, of that which is 
nothing to the purpose?' My learning is such 
as God gave me in my birth and habit, in the 
delight and study of my eyes, and not of an- 
other man's. Of all absurdities, this of some 
foreigner, purposing to take away my rhetoric, 
and substitute his own, and amuse me with 
pelican and stork, instead of thrush and robin; 
palm-trees and shittim-wood, instead of sassa- 
fras and hickory, — seems the most needless. ' 



>» 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 121 

Locke said, "God, when he makes the pro- 
phet, does not unmake the man." Sweden- 
borg's history points the remark. The parish 
disputes, in the Swedish church, between the 
friends and foes of Luther and Melancthon, 
concerning' "faith alone," and "works alone," 
intrude themselves into his speculations upon 
the economy of the universe, and of the celes- 
tial societies. The Lutheran bishop's son, for 
whom the heavens are opened, so that he sees 
with eyes, and in the richest symbolic forms, 
the awful truth of things, and utters again, in 
his books, as under a heavenly mandate, the 
indisputable secrets of moral nature, — with all 
these grandeurs resting upon him, remains the 
Lutheran bishop's son ; his judgments are those 
of a Swedish polemic, and his vast enlarge- 
ments purchased by adamantine limitations. 
He carries his controversial memory with him, 
in his visits to the souls. He is like Michel 
Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the cardinal 
who had offended him to roast under a moun- 
tain of devils ; or, like Dante, who avenged, in 
vindictive melodies, all his private wrongs; or, 
perhaps still more like Montaigne's parish 
priest, who, if a hailstorm passes over the vil- 
lage, thinks the day of doom has come, and 
the cannibals already have got the pip. 
Swedenborg confounds us not less with the 
pains of Melancthon, and Luther, and Wolfius, 
and his own books, which he advertises among 
the angels. 

Under the same theologic cramp, many of 
his dogmas are bound. His cardinal position 



1^ 



122 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

in morals is, that evils should be shunned as 
sins. But he does not know what evil is, or 
what good is, who thinks any ground remains 
to be occupied, after saying that evil is to be 
shunned as evil. I doubt not he was led by the 
desire to insert the element of personality of 
Deity. But nothing is added. One man, you 
say, dreads erysipelas, — show him that this 
dread is evil: or, one dreads hell, — show him 
that dread is evil. He who loves goodness, 
harbors angels, reveres reverence, and lives 
with God. The less we have to do with our 
sins, the better. No man can afford to waste 
his moments in compunctions. "That is ac- 
tive duty," say the Hindoos, "which is not 
for our bondage ; that is knowledge, which is 
for our liberation; all other duty is good only 
unto weariness." 

Another dogma, growing out of this perni- 
cious theologic limitation, is this Inferno. 
Swedenborg has devils. Evil, according to 
old philosophers, is good in the making. That 
pure malignity can exist, is the extreme propo- 
sition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained 
by a rational agent ; it is atheism ; it is the last 
profanation. Euripides rightly said,— 

"Goodness and being in the gods are one; 
He who imputes ill to them makes them none." 

To what a painful perversion had Gothic 
theology arrived, that Swedenborg admitted 
no conversion for evil spirits! But the divine 
effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun 
will convert itself to grass and flowers; and 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 123 

man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, 
is on his way to all that is good and true. 
Burns, with the wild humor of his apostrophe 
to "poor old Nickie Ben," 

"O wad ye tak a thought, and mead!" 

has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. 
Everything is superficial, and perishes, but 
love and truth only. The largest is always the 
truest sentiment, and we feel the more gener- 
ous spirit of the Indian Vishnu, — "I am the 
same to all mankind. There is not one who is 
worthy of my love or hatred. They who serve 
me with adoration, — I am in them, and they 
in me. If one whose ways are altogether 
evil, serve me alone, he is as respectable as 
the just man ; he is altogether well employed ; 
he soon becometh of a virtuous spirit, and ob- 
taineth eternal happiness." 

For the anomalous pretension of Revela- 
tions of the other world, — only his probity and 
genius can entitle it to any serious regard. 
His revelations destroy their credit by running 
into detail. If a man say, that the Holy Ghost 
hath informed him that the Last Judgment (or 
the last of the judgments) took place in 1757; 
or, that the Dutch, in the other world, live in a 
heaven by themselves, and the English in a 
heaven by themselves; I reply, that the Spirit 
which is holy, is reserved, taciturn, and deals 
in laws. The rumors of ghosts and hobgoblins 
gossip and tell fortunes. The teachings of 
the high Spirit are abstemious, and, in regard 
to particulars, negative. Socrates' Genius did 



124 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

not advise him to act or to find, but if he pro- 
posed to do somewhat not advantageous, it dis- 
suaded him. '*What God is," he said, "I 
know not; what he is not I know. " The Hin- 
doos have denominated the Supreme Being, 
the ''Internal Check." The illuminated Quak- 
ers explained their Light, not as somewhat 
which leads to any action, but it appears as an 
obstruction to anything unfit. But the right 
examples are private experiences, which are 
absolutely at one on this point. Strictly speak- 
ing, Swedenborg's revelation is a confounding 
of planes, — a capital offence in so learned a 
categorist. This is to carry the law of surface 
into the plane of substance, to carry individu- 
alism and its fopperies into the realm of es- 
sences and generals, which is dislocation and 
chaos. 

The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. 
No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt 
an early syllable to answer the longings of 
saints, the fears of mortals. We should have 
listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by 
stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts 
into parallelism with the celestial currents, 
and could hint to human ears the scenery and 
circumstance of the newly parted soul. But it 
is certain that it must tally with what is best 
in nature. It must not be inferior in tone to 
the already knowm works of the artist who 
sculptures the globes of the firmament, and 
writes the moral law. It must be fresher than 
rainbows, stabler than mountains, agreeing 
with flowers, with tides, and the rising and set- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 125 

ting- of autumnal stars. Melodious poets shall 
be hoarse as street ballads, when once the pene- 
trating key-note of nature and spirit is sounded, 
— the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat which 
makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the 
globule of blood, and the sap of trees. 

In this mood, we hear the rumor that the 
seer has arrived, and his tale is told. But 
there is no beauty, no heaven: for angels, gob- 
lins. The sad muse loves night and death, 
and the pit. His Inferno is mesmeric. His 
spiritual world bears the same relation to the 
generosities and joys of truth, of which human 
souls have already made us cognizant, as a 
man's bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It 
is indeed very like, in its endless power of lurid 
pictures, to the phenomena of dreaming, which 
nightly turns many an honest gentleman, 
benevolent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulk- 
ing like a dog about the outer yards and ken- 
nels of creation. When he mounts into the 
heavens, I do not hear its language. A man 
should not tell me that he has walked among 
the angels; his proof is, that his eloquence 
makes me one. Shall the archangels be less 
majestic and sweet than the figures that have 
actually walked the earth? These angels 
that Swedenborg painrs give us no very high 
idea of their discipline and culture; they are 
all country parsons; their heaven is a fete 
cJiampetre^ and evangelical picnic, or French 
distribution of prizes to virtuous peasants. 
Strange, scholastic, didactic, passionless, blood- 
less man, who denotes classes of souls as a 



126 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

botanist disposes of a carex, and visits doleful 
hells as a stratum of chalk or hornblende ! He 
has no sympathy. He goes up and down the 
world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold- 
headed cane and peruke, and with nonchal- 
ance, and the air of a referee, distributing souls. 
The warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled 
world is to him a grammar of hieroglyphs, 
or an emblematic freemason's procession. 
How different is Jacob Behmen! he is tremu- 
lous with emotion, and listens awe-struck, with 
the gentlest humanity, to the Teacher whose 
lessons he conveys; and when he asserts that, 
"in some sort, love is greater than God," his 
heart beats so high that the thumping against 
his leathern coat is audible across the centuries. 
'Tis a great difference. Behmen is healthily 
and beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mys- 
tical narrowness and incommunicableness. 
Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and, with all 
his accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels. 

It is the best sign of a great nature, that it 
opens a foreground, and, like the breath of 
morning landscapes, invites us onward. 
Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest 
him of his mattock and shroud. Some minds 
are forever restrained from descending into 
nature; others are forever prevented from 
ascending out of it. With a force of many 
men, he could never break the umbilical cord 
which held him to nature, and he did not rise 
to the platform of pure genius. 

It is remarkable that this man, who, by his 
perception of symbols, saw the poetic construe- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 127 

tion of things, and the primary relation of mind 
to matter, remained entirely devoid of the 
whole apparatus of poetic expression, which 
that perception creates. He knew the gram- 
mar and rudiments of the Mother-Tongue, — 
how could he not read off one strain into music? 
Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, designed 
to fill his lap with the celestial flowers, as pres- 
ents for his friends; but the fragrance of the 
roses so intoxicated him, that the skirt dropped 
from his hands? or, is reporting a breach of 
the manners of that heavenly society? or, was 
it that he saw the vision intellectually, and 
hence that chiding of the intellectual that per- 
vades his books? Be it as it may, his books 
have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no re- 
lief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse 
and accurate imagery is no pleasure, for there 
is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lack- 
lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in all 
these gardens of the dead. The entire want 
of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens 
the disease, and, like a hoarse voice in a beauti- 
ful person, is a kind of warning. I think, 
sometimes, he will not be read longer. His 
great name will turn a sentence. His books 
have become a monument. His laurels so 
largely mixed with cypress, a charnel-breath so 
mingles with the temple incense, that boys 
and maids will shun the spot. 

Yet, in this immolation of genius and fame 
at the shrine of conscience, is a merit sublime 
beyond praise. He lived to purpose : he gave 
a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue to 



128 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

which the soul must cling in all this labyrinth 
of nature. Many opinions conflict as to the 
true center. In the shipwreck, some cling to 
running rigging, some to cask and barrel, 
some to spars, some to mast; the pilot chooses 
with science, — I plant myself here; all will 
sink before this; "he comes to land who sails 
with me. ' ' Do not rely on heavenly favor, or 
on compassion to folly, or on prudence, on 
common sense, the old usage and main chance 
of men; nothing can keep you, — not fate, nor 
health, nor admirable intellect; none can keep 
you, but rectitude only, rectitude forever and 
ever! — and, with a tenacity that never swerved 
in all his studies, inventions, dreams, he ad- 
heres to this brave choice. I think of him as 
of some transmigratory votary of Indian le- 
gend, who says, ''Though I be dog, or jackal, 
or pismire, in the last rudiments of nature, un- 
der what integument or ferocity, I cleave to 
right, as the sure ladder that leads up to man 
and to God." 

Swedenborg has rendered a double service 
to mankind, which is now only beginning to 
be known. By the science of experiment and 
use, he made his first steps; he observed and 
published the laws of nature ; and, ascending 
by just degrees, from events to their summits 
and causes, he was fired with piety at the har- 
monies he felt, and abandoned himself to his 
joy and worship. This was his first service. 
If the glory was too bright for his eyes to bear, 
if he staggered under the trance of delight, the 
more excellent is the spectacle he saw, the 



re O 




REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 129 

realities of being which beam and blaze through 
him, and which no infirmities of the prophet 
are suffered to obscure; and he renders a 
second passive service to men, not less than 
the first, — perhaps, in the great circle of being, 
and in the retributions of spiritual nature, not 
less glorious or less beautiful to himself. 



9 Representative Men 



MONTAIGNE: OR, THE SKEPTIC. 



131 



IV. 
MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 

Every fact is related on one side to sensation 
and, on the other, to morals. The game of 
thought is, on the appearance of one of these 
two sides, to find the other; given the upper, 
to find the under side. Nothing so thin, but 
has these two faces; and, when the observer 
has seen the obverse, he turns it over to see 
the reverse. 

Life is a pitching of this penny, — heads or 
tails. We never tire of this game, because 
there is still a slight shudder of astonishment 
at the exhibition of the other face, at the con- 
trast of the two faces. A man is flushed with 
success, and bethinks himself what this good 
luck signifies. He drives his bargain in the 
street; but it occurs that he also is bought 
and sold. He sees the beauty of a human face, 
and searches the cause of that beauty, which 
must be more beautiful. He builds his for- 
tunes, maintains the laws, cherishes his chil- 
dren; but he asks himself, why? and whereto? 
This head and this tail are called, in the lan- 
guage of philosophy. Infinite and Finite ; Rel- 
ative and Absolute ; Apparent and Real ; and 
many fine names beside. 
133 



134 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Each man is born with a predisposition to 
one or the other of these sides of nature ; and 
it will easily happen that men will be found 
devoted to one or the other. One class has the 
perception of difference, and is conversant with 
facts and surfaces ; cities and persons ; and the 
bringing certain things to pass; — the men of 
talent and action. Another class have the 
perception of identity, and are men of faith 
and philosophy, men of genius. 

Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus 
believes only in philosophers; Fenelon, in 
saints; Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read 
the haughty language in which Plato and the 
Platonists speak of all men who are not devoted 
to their own shining abstractions: other men 
are rats and mice. The literary class is usually 
proud and exclusive. The correspondence of 
Pope and Swift describes mankind around 
them as monsters; and that of Goethe and 
Schiller, in our own time, is scarcely more 
kind. 

It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. 
The genius is a genius by the first look he 
casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does 
he not rest in angles and colors, but beholds 
the design — he will presently undervalue the 
actual object. In powerful moments, his 
thought has dissolved the works of art and 
nature into their causes, so that the works 
appear heavy and faulty. He has a concep- 
tion of beauty which the sculptor cannot em- 
body. Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steam- 
engine, existed first in an artist's mind, with- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 135 

out flaw, mistake, or friction, which impair the 
executed models. So did the church, the 
state, college, court, social circle, and all the 
institutions. It is not strange that these m^en, 
remembering what they have seen and hoped 
of ideas, should affirm disdainfully the superi- 
ority of ideas. Having at some time seen that 
the happy soul will carry all the arts in power, 
they say. Why cumber ourselves with superflu- 
ous realizations? and, like dreaming beggars, 
they assume to speak and act as if these val- 
ues were already substantiated. 

On the other part, the men of toil and trade 
and luxury, — the animal world, including the 
animal in the philosopher and poet also, — and 
the practical world, including the painful 
drudgeries which are never excused to philos- 
opher or poet any more than to the rest, — 
weigh heavily on the other side. The trade in 
our streets believes in no metaphysical causes, 
thinks nothing of the force which necessitated 
traders and a trading planet to exist ; no, but 
sticks to cotton, sugar, wool, and salt. The 
ward meetings, on election days, are not soft- 
ened by any misgivings of the value of these 
ballotings. Hot life is streaming in a single 
direction. To the men of this world, to the 
animal strength and spirits, to the men of prac- 
tical power, whilst immersed in it, the man of 
ideas appears out of his reason. They alone 
have reason. 

Things always bring their own philosophy 
with them, that is, prudence. No man acquires 
property without acquiring with it a little 



136 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

arithmetic, also. In England, the richest 
country that ever existed, property stands for 
more, compared with personal ability, than in 
any other. After dinner, a man believes less, 
denies more; verities have lost some charm. 
After dinner, arithmetic is the only science; 
ideas are disturbing, incendiary, follies of 
young men, repudiated by the solid portion of 
society ; and a man comes to be valued by his 
athletic and animal qualities. Spence relates, 
that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller 
one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, 
came in. "Nephew," said Sir Godfrey, "you 
have the honor of seeing the two greatest men 
in the world." *'I don't know how great men 
you may be," said the Guinea man, "but I 
don't like your looks. I have often bought a 
man much better than both of you, all muscles 
and bones, for ten guineas. Thus, the men 
of the senses revenge themselves on the pro- 
fessors, and repay scorn for scorn. The first 
had leaped to conclusions not yet ripe, and say 
more than is true ; the others make themselves 
merry with the philosopher, and weigh man by 
the pound. — They believe that mustard bites 
the tongue, that pepper is hot, friction-matches 
are incendiary, revolvers to be avoided, and 
suspenders hold up pantaloons; that there is 
much sentiment in a chest of tea ; and a man 
will be eloquent, if you give him good wine. 
Are you tender and scrupulous, — you must 
eat more mince-pie. They hold that Luther 
had milk in him when he said, 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 137 

" Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang 
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang;" 

and when he advised a young scholar perplexed 
with fore-ordination and free-will, to get well 
drunk. "The nerves," says Cabanis, "they 
are the man." My neighbor, a jolly farmer, 
in the tavern bar-room, thinks that the use of 
money is sure and speedy spending. "For his 
part," he says, "he puts his down his neck, 
and gets the good of it. ' ' 

The inconvenience of this way of thinking 
is, that it runs into indifferentism, and then 
into disgust. Life is eating us up. We shall 
be fables presently. Keep cool : it will be all 
one a hundred years hence. Life's well 
enough ; but we shall be glad to get out of it, 
and they will all be glad to have us. Why 
should we fret and drudge? Our meat will 
taste to-morrow as it did yesterday, and we 
may at last have had enough of it. "Ah, " said 
my languid gentleman at Oxford, "there's 
nothing new or true, — and no matter." 

With a little more bitterness, the cynic 
moans : our life is like an ass led to market by 
a bundle of hay being carried before him : he 
sees nothing but the bundle of hay. "There is 
so much trouble in coming into the world," 
said Lord Bolingbroke, "and so much more, as 
well as meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis 
hardly worth while to be here at all." I knew 
a philosopher of this kidney, who was accus- 
tomed briefly to sum up his experience of hu- 
man nature in saying, "Mankind is a damned 

10 Ropreeentutive Mon 



138 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

rascal:" and the natural corollary is pretty 
sure to follow, — "The world lives by humbug, 
and so will I." 

The abstractionist and the materialist thus 
mutually exasperating each other, and the 
scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, 
there arises a third party to occupy the middle 
ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. 
He finds both wrong by being in extremes. 
He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of 
the balance. He will not go beyond his card. 
He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the 
street; he will not be a Gibeonite; he stands 
for the intellectual faculties, a cool head, and 
whatever serves to keep it cool; no unadvised 
industry, no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss 
of the brains in toil. Am I an ox, or a dray? 
— You are both in extremes, he says. You 
that will have all solid, and a world of pig -lead, 
deceive yourselves grossly. You believe your- 
selves rooted and grounded on adamant ; and, 
yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowl- 
edge, you are spinning like bubbles in a river, 
you know not whither or whence, and you are 
bottomed and capped and wrapped in delu- 
sions. 

Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and 
wrapped in a gown. The studious class are 
their own victims; they are thin and pale, 
their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the 
night is without sleep, the day a fear of inter- 
ruption, — pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. 
If you come near them, and see what conceits 
they entertain, — they are abstractionists, and 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 139 

Spend their days and nights in dreaming some 
dreams; in expecting the homage of society to 
some precious scheme built on a truth, but 
destitute of proportion in its presentment, of 
justness in its application, and of all energy of 
will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it. 
But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. 
I know that human strength is not in extremes, 
but in avoiding extremes. I, at least, will 
shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond 
my depth. What is the use of pretending to 
powers we have not? What is the use of pre- 
tending to assurances we have not, respecting 
the other life? Why exaggerate the power of 
virtue? Why be an angel before your time? 
These strings, wound up too high, will snap. 
If there is a wish for immortality, and no evi- 
dence, why not say just that? If there are 
conflicting evidences, why not state them? If 
there is not ground for a candid thinker to 
make up his mind, yea or nay, — why not sus- 
pend the judgment? I weary of these dogma- 
tizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who 
deny the dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. 
I stand here to try the case. I am here to con- 
sider, — to consider how it is. I will try to 
keep the balance true. Of what use to take 
the chair, and glibly rattle off theories of soci- 
eties, religion, and nature, when I know that 
practical objections lie in the way, insurmount- 
able by me and by my mates? Why so talka- 
tive in public, when each of my neighbors can 
pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot re- 
fute? Why pretend that life is so simple a 



140 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

game, when we know how subtle and elusive 
the Proteus is? Why think to shut up all 
things in your narrow coop, when we know 
there are not one or two only, but ten, twenty, 
a thousand things, and unlike? Why fancy that 
you have all the truth in your keeping? There 
is much to say on all sides. 
^ W^ho shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing 
that there is no practical question on which 
anything more than an approximate solution 
can be had? Is not marriage an open question 
when it is alleged, from the beginning of the 
world, that such as are in the institution wish 
to get out, and such as are out wish to get in? 
And the reply of Socrates, to him who asked 
whether he should choose a wife, still remains 
reasonable, "that, whether he should choose 
one or not, he would repent it." Is not the 
state a question? All society is divided in 
opinion on the subject of the state. Nobody 
loves it; great numbers dislike it, and suffer 
conscientious scruples to allegiance: and the 
only defense set up, is, the fear of doing worse 
in disorganizing. Is it otherwise with the 
church? Or, to put any of the questions which 
touch mankind nearest, — shall the j^oung man 
aim at a leading part in law, in politics, in 
trade? It will not be pretended that a success 
in either of these kinds is quite coincident 
with what is best and inmost in his mind. 
Shall he, then, cutting the stays that hold him 
fast to the social state, put out to sea with no 
guidance but his genius? There is much to 
sav on both sides. Remember the open ques- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 141 

tion between the present order of "competi- 
tion, * ' and the friends of ' ' attractive and asso- 
ciated labor. " The generous minds embrace 
the proposition of labor shared by all; it is the 
only honesty ; nothing else is safe. It is from 
the poor man's hut alone, that strength and 
virtue come ; and yet, on the other side, it is 
alleged that labor impairs the form, and 
breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers i^ry 
unanimously, "We have no thoughts." Cult- 
ure, how indispensable! I cannot forgive you 
the want of accomplishment ; and yet, culture 
will instantly destroy that chiefest beauty of 
spontaneousness. Excellent is culture for a 
savage ; but once let him read in the book, and 
he is^'no longer able not to think of Plutarch's 
heroes. In short, since true fortitude of un- 
derstanding consists "in not letting w^hat we 
know be embarrassed by what we do not 
know," we ought to secure those advantages 
which we can command, and not risk them by 
clutching after the airy and unattainable. 
Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let 
us mix in affairs; let us learn, and get, and 
have, and climb. "Men are a sort of moving; 
plants, and, like trees, receive a great part of 
their nourishment from the air. If they keep 
too much at home, they pine." Let us have 
a robust, manly life; let us know what we 
know, for certain ; what we have, let it be solid, 
and seasonable, and our own. A world in the 
hand is worth two in the bush. Let us have 
to do with real men and women, and not with 
skipping ghosts. 



142 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

This, then, is the right ground of the skep- 
tic, — this of consideration, of self-containing; 
not at all of unbelief; not at all of universal 
denying, nor of universal doubting, — doubting 
even that he doubts; least of all, of scoffing 
and profligate jeering at all that is stable and 
good. These are no more his moods than are 
those of religion and philosophy. He is the 
considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, count- 
ing stock, husbanding his means, believing 
that a man has too many enemies, than that he 
can afford to be his own ; that we cannot give 
ourselves too many advantages, in this unequal 
conflict, with powers so vast and unweariable 
ranged on one side, and this little, conceited, 
vulnerable popinjay that a man is, bobbing up 
and down into every danger, on the other. It 
is a position taken up for better defense, as of 
more safety, and one that can be maintained ; 
and it is one of more opportunity and range ; 
as, when we build a house, the rule is, to set 
it not too high nor too low, under the wind, 
but out of the dirt. 

The philosophy we want is one of fluxions 
and mobility. The Spartan and Stoic schemes 
are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A 
theory of Saint John, and of non-resistance, 
seems, on the other hand, too thin and aerial. 
We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout 
as the first, and limber as the second. We 
want a ship in these billows we inhabit. An 
angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips 
and splinters, in this storm of many elements. 
No, it must be tight, and fit to the form of 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 143 

man, to live at all ; as a shell is the architect- 
ure of a house founded on the sea. The soul 
of man must be the type of our scheme, just 
as the body of man is the type after which a 
dwellino^-house is built. Adaptiveness is the 
peculiarity of human nature. We are golden 
averages, volitant stabilities, compensated or 
periodic errors, houses founded on the sea. The 
wise skeptic wishes to have a near view of the 
best game, and the chief players ; what is best in 
the planet ; art and nature, places and events, 
but mainl)^ men. Everything that is excellent 
in mankind, — a form of grace, an arm of iron, 
lips of persuasion, a brain of resources, every 
one skilful to play and win, — he will see and 
judge. 

The terms of admission to this spectacle are, 
that he have a certain solid and intelligible 
way of living of his own ; some method of an- 
swering the inevitable needs of human life; 
proof that he has played with skill and success; 
that he has evinced the temper, stoutness, and 
the range of qualities which, among his con- 
temporaries and countrymen, entitle him to 
fellowship and trust. For, the secrets of life 
are not shown except to sympathy and like- 
ness. Men do not confide themselves to boys, 
or coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. 
Some wise limitation, as the modern phrase 
is; some condition between the extremes, and 
having itself a positive quality ; some stark and 
sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but 
sufficiently related to the world to do justice 
to Paris or London, and, at the same time, a 



144 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

vigorous and original thinker, whom cities can- 
not overawe, but who uses them, — is the fit 
person to occupy this ground of speculation. 

These qualities meet in the character of 
Montaigne. And yet, since the personal re- 
gard which I entertain for Montaigne may be 
unduly great, I will, under the shield of this 
prince of egotists, offer, as an apology for elect- 
ing him as the representative of skepticism, a 
word or two to explain how my love began and 
grew for this admirable gossip. 

A single odd volume of Cotton's translation 
of the Essays remained to me from my father's 
library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, 
until, after many years, when I was newly 
escaped from college, I read the book, and pro- 
cured the remaining volumes. I remember 
the delight and wonder in which I lived with 
it. It seemed to me as if I had myself written 
the book, in some former life, so sincerely it 
spoke to my thought and experience. It hap- 
pened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the 
cemetery of Pere le Chaise, I came to a 
tomb of Augustus Collignon, who died in 1830, 
aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the mon- 
ument, "lived to do right, and had formed 
himself to virtue on the Essays of Montaigne. " 
Some years later, I became acquainted with an 
accomplished English poet, John Sterling; 
and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I 
found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had 
made a pilgrimage to his chateau, still standing 
near Castellan, in Perigord, and, after two 
hundred and fifty years, had copied from the 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 145 

walls of his library the inscriptions which 
Montaigne had written there. That Journal 
of Mr. Sterling's, published in the Westmin- 
ster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in the 
Prolegomenae to his edition of the Essays. I 
heard with pleasure that one of the newly-dis- 
covered autographs of William Shakspeare was 
in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. 
It is the only book which we certainly know 
to have been in the poet's library. And, oddly 
enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which 
the British Museum purchased, with a view of 
protecting the Shakspeare autograph (as I was 
informed in the Museum), turned out to have 
the autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. 
Leigh Hunt relates of Lord Byron, that Mon- 
taigne was the only great writer of past times 
whom he read with avowed satisfaction. Other 
coincidences, not needful to be mentioned here, 
concurred to make this old Gascon still new 
and immortal for me. 

In 15 71, on the death of his father, Mon- 
taigne, then thirty-eight years old, retired from 
the practice of law, at Bordeaux, and settled 
himself on his estate. Though he had been a 
man of pleasure, and sometimes a courtier, his 
studious habits now grew on him, and he loved 
the compass, staidness, and independence of 
the country gentleman's life. He took up his 
economy in good earnest, and made his farms 
yield the most. Downright and plain-dealing, 
and abhorring to be deceived or to deceive, he 
was esteemed in the country for his sense and 
probity. In the civil wars of the League, 



146 J.ZPP.ZSZirTATR-E MEN. 

which ::'izi"i:Tiec. everv house i:i:o a ion. Mon- 
taigne hept his gates open, and hfs honse with- 
ont defense. All parties freelv came and 
went, his conrage and honor being universally 
esteemed. The neighc-oring lords and gentry 
hrc"rht -e^e's snd nepers to him for safe- 
V ns. in these bigoted 

::..., _-: ... _.:. .. .iberality in France. — 
Htnry IV. and Montaigne. 

! _' '-"-:gne is the franhest and honestest of 

1 rs. His French freedom rnns into 

" e has anticipated all censnres 

: his own confessions. In his 

'itten to one sex only, and 

:n in Latin: so that, in a 



trs, of a literature 

.::es. do not allow. 

i-:.nes5, coupled with 

.-, may shnt his pages 

'^: : is 

^t 



.g five 

c.:^^ ^-. ... . -" in 

r^all "Fiv- us 

' ; says, * : :- ' as 

'^/' E:: 'iy 

^ -'--.' r: .:--,: in invmc- 

; — - :L 1 ;r 5 mind. 

Wbeni : religionsly 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 147 

confess myself. I find that the best virtue I 
have has in it some tincture of ^-ice ; and I am 
afraid that Plato, in his purest virtue (I. who 
am as sincere and perfect a lover of \-irtue of 
that stamp as any other whatever), if he had 
listened, and laid his ear close to himself, 
would have heard some jarring sound of human 
mixture: but faint and remote, and only to be 
perceived by himself." 

Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at 
color or pretense of any kind. He has been in 
courts so long as to have conceived a furious 
disgnst at appearances : he will indulge himself 
with a little cursing and swearing; he will talk 
with sailors and g:}-psies. use flash and street 
ballads : he has stayed indoors till he is deadly 
sick; he will to the open air, though it rain 
bullets. He has seen too much of gentlemen 
of the long robe, until he wishes for cannibals : 
and is so nervous, by factitious life, that he 
thinks, the more barbarous man is. the better 
he is. He likes his saddle. You may read 
theology, and grammar, and metaphysics else- 
where. WTiatever you get here, shall smack 
of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, 
or stinging. He makes no hesitation to enter- 
tain you with the records of his disease : and 
his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. 
He took and kept this position of equilibrium. 
Over his name, he drew an emblematic pair of 
scales, and wrote, 0:u' SMS-jt-f under it. 
As I look at his eflig}- opposite the title-page, 
I seem to hear him say, *'Yoii may play old 
Poz, if you will ; you may rail and exaggerate, 



148 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

— I stand here for truth, and will not, for all 
the states, and churches, and revenues, and 
personal reputations of Europe, overstate the 
dry fact, as I see it; I will rather mumble and 
prose about what I certainly know, — my house 
and barns; my father, my wife, and my ten- 
ants ; my old lean bald pate ; my knives and 
forks; what meats I eat, and what drinks I 
prefer; and a hundred straws just as ridicu- 
lous, — than I will write, with a fine crow-quill, 
a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn 
and winter weather. I am gray and autumnal 
myself, and think an undress, and old shoes 
that do not pinch my feet, and old friends who 
do not constrain me, and plain topics where I 
do not need to strain myself and pump my 
brains, the most suitable. Our condition as 
men is risky and ticklish enough. One cannot 
be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but 
he may be whisked off into some pitiable or 
ridiculous plight. Why should I vapor and 
play the philosopher, instead of ballasting, the 
best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at least, 
I live within compass, keep myself ready for 
action, and can shoot the gulf, at last, with 
decency. If there be anything farcical in such 
a life, the blame is not mine ; let it lie at fate's 
and nature's door." 

The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining 
soliloquy on every random topic that comes 
into his head; treating everything without 
ceremony, yet with masculine sense. There 
have been men with deeper insight; but, one 
would say, never a man with such abundance 



REPRESENTATIVE ME^N. 149 

of thoughts; he is never dull, never insincere, 
and has the genius to make the reader care for 
all that he cares for. 

The sincerity and marrow of the man 
reaches to his sentences. I know not any- 
where the book that seems less written. It is 
the language of conversation transferred to a 
book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; 
they are vascular and alive. One has the same 
pleasure in it that we have in listening to the 
necessary speech of men about their work, 
when any unusual circumstance give moment- 
ary importance to the dialogue. For black- 
smiths and teamsters do not trip in their 
speech; it is a shower of bullets. It is Cam- 
bridge men who correct themselves, and begin 
again at every half-sentence, and, moreover, 
will pun, and refine too much, and swerve from 
the matter to the expression. Montaigne talks 
with shrewdness, knows the world, and books, 
and himself, and uses the positive degree; 
never shrieks, or protests, or prays; no weak- 
ness, no convulsion, no superlative; does not 
wish to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, 
or annihilate space or time ; but is stout and 
solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes 
pain, because it makes him feel himself, and 
realize things ; as we pinch ourselves to know 
that we are awake. He keeps the plain ; he 
rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid 
ground, and the stones underneath. His writ- 
ing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration ; con- 
tented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle 
of the road. There is but one exception, — in 



150 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

his love for Socrates. In speaking- of him, for 
once his cheek flushes, and his style rises to 
passion. 

Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of 
sixty, in 1592. When he came to die, he caused 
the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At 
the age of thirty-three, he had been married. 
*'But, " he says, "might I have had my own 
will, I would not have married Wisdom her- 
self, if she would have had me; but 'tis to 
much purpose to evade it, the common custom 
and use of life will have it so. Most of my 
actions are guided by example, not choice." 
In the hour of death he gave the same weight 
to custom. Que sais-je ? What do I know. 

This book of Montaigne the world has en- 
dorsed, by translating it into all tongues, and 
printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe ; 
and that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen, 
namely, among courtiers, soldiers, princes, 
men of the world, and men of wit and gener- 
osity. 

Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken 
wisely, and given the right and permanent 
expression of the human mind, on the conduct 
of life? 

We are natural believers. Truth, or the 
connection between cause and effect, alone in- 
terests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs 
through all things ; all worlds are strung on it, 
as beads; and men, and events, and life, come 
to us, only because of that thread; they pass 
and repass, only that we may know the direc- 
tion and continuity of that line. A book or 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 151 

Statement which goes to show that there is no 
line, but random and chaos, a calamity out of 
nothing, a prosperity and no account of it, a 
hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero, — dis- 
pirits us. Seen or unseen, we believe the tie 
exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties ; genius 
finds the real ones. We hearken to the man 
of science, because we anticipate the sequence 
in natural phenomena which he uncovers. We 
love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; 
and dislike what scatters or pulls down. One 
man appears whose nature is to all men's eyes 
conserving and constructive ; his presence sup- 
poses a well-ordered society, agriculture, trade, 
large institutions, and empire. If these did 
not exist, they would begin to exist through 
his endeavors. Therefore, he cheers and com- 
forts men, who feel all this in him very readily. 
The nonconformist and the rebel say all man- 
ner of unanswerable things against the exist- 
ing republic, but discover to our sense no plan 
of house or state of their own. Therefore, 
though the town, and state, and way of living, 
which our counselor contemplated, might be 
a very modest or musty prosperity, yet men 
rightly go for him, and reject the reformer, so 
long as he comes only with axe and crowbar. 
But though we are natural conservers and 
causationists, and reject a sour, dumpish un- 
belief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne 
represents, have reason, and every man, at 
some time, belongs to it. Every superior mind 
will pass through this domain of equilibration, 
— I should rather say, will know how to avail 



152 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

himself of the checks and balances in nature, 
as a natural weapon against the exaggeration 
and formalism of bigots and blockheads. 

Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the 
student in relation to the particulars which 
society adores, but which he sees to be reverent 
only in their tendency and spirit. The ground 
occupied by the skeptic is the vestibule of the 
temple. Society does not like to have any 
breath of question blown on the existing order. 
But the interrogation of custom at all points is 
an inevitable stage in the growth of every 
superior mind, and is the evidence of its per- 
ception of the flowing power which remains 
itself in all changes. 

The superior mind will find itself equally at 
odds with the evils of society, and with the 
projects that are offered to relieve them. The 
wise skeptic is a bad citizen ; no conservative ; 
he sees the selfishness of property, and the 
drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he 
fit to work with any democratic party that ever 
was constituted; for parties wish every one 
coip-mitted, and he penetrates the popular 
'--patriotism. His politics are those of the 
"Soul's Errand" of Sir Walter Raleigh; or of 
Krishna, in the Bhagavat, "There is none who 
is worthy of my love or hatred;" while he 
sentences law, physic, divinity, commerce, and 
custom. He is a reformer: yet he is no better 
member of the philanthropic association. It 
turns out that he is not the champion of the 
operative, the pauper, the prisoner, the slave. 
It stands in his mind, that our life in this 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 153 

world is not of quite so easy interpretation as 
churches and school-books say. He does not 
wish to take ground against these benevo- 
lences, to play the part of devil's attorney, and 
blazon every doubt and sneer that darkens the 
sun for him. But he says. There are doubts. 

I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the 
calendar-day of our Saint Michel de Montaigne, 
by counting and describing these doubts or 
negations. I wish to ferret them out of their 
holes, and sun them a little. We must do with 
them as the police do with old rogues, who are 
shown up to the public at the marshal's office. 
They will never be so formidable, when once 
they have been identified and registered. But 
I mean honestly by them — that justice shall be 
done to their terrors. I shall not take Sunday 
objections, made up on purpose to be put 
down. I shall take the worst I can find, 
whether I can dispose of them, or they;of me. 

I do not press the skepticism of the material- 
ist. I know the quadruped opinion will not 
prevail. 'Tis of no importance what bats and 
oxen think. The first dangerous symptom I 
report is, the levity of intellect ; as if it were 
fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge 
is the knowing that we cannot know. The 
dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers. 
How respectable is earnestness on every plat- 
form! but intellect kills it. Nay, San Carlo, 
my subtle and admirable friend, one of the 
most penetrating of men, finds that all direct 
ascension, even of lofty piety, leads to this 
ghastly insight, and sends back the votary or- 



154 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

phaned. My astonishing San Carlo thought 
the lawgivers and saints infected. They found 
the ark empty ; saw, and would not tell ; and 
tried to choke off their approaching followers, 
by saying, "Action, action, my dear fellows, 
is for you!" Bad as was to me this detection 
by San Carlo, this frost in July, this blow from 
a brick, there was still a worse, namely, the 
cloy or satiety of the saints. In the mount of 
vision, ere they have yet risen from their 
knees, they say, "We discover that this our 
homage and beatitude is partial and deformed ; 
we must fly for relief to the suspected and re- 
viled Intellect, to the Understanding, the 
Mephistopheles, to the gymnastics of latent." 

This is hobgoblin the first; and, though it 
has been the subject of much elegy, in our 
nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe, and 
other poets of less fame, not to mention many 
distinguished private observers, — I confess it 
is not very affecting to my imagination ; for it 
seems to concern the shattering of baby-houses 
and crockery-shops. What flutters the church 
of Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of 
Boston, may yet be very far from touching any 
principle of faith. I think that the intellect 
and moral sentiment are unanimous; and that, 
though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it 
supplies the natural checks of vice, and polar- 
ity to the soul. I think that the wiser a man 
is, the more stupendous he finds the natural and 
moral economy, and lifts himself to a more 
absolute reliance. 

There is the power of moods, each setting at 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 155 

nought all but its own tissue of facts and be- 
liefs. There is the power of complexions, ob- 
viously modifying the dispositions and senti- 
ments. The beliefs and unbeliefs appear to be 
structural; and, as soon as each man attains 
the poise and vivacity which allow the whole 
machinery to play, he will not need extreme 
examples, but will rapidly alternate all opin- 
ions in his own life. Our life is March weather, 
savage and serene in one hour. We go forth 
austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links 
of Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to 
save our life ; but a book, or a bust, or only 
the sound of a name, shoots a spark through 
the nerves, and we suddenly believe in will: 
my finger-ring shall be the seal of Solomon : 
fate is for imbeciles : all is possible to the re- 
solved mind. Presently, a new experience 
gives a new turn to our thoughts: common 
sense resumes its tyranny: we say, "Well, the 
army, after all, is the gate to fame, manners, 
and poetry: and, look you, — on the whole, 
selfishness plants best, prunes best, makes the 
best commerce, and the best citizen." Are 
the opinions of a man on right and wrong, on 
fate and causation, at the mercy of a broken 
sleep or an indigestion? Is his belief in God 
and Duty no deeper than a stomach evidence? 
And what guaranty for the permanence of his 
opinions? I like not the French celerity, — a 
new church and state once a week. — This is the 
second negation; and I shall let it pass for 
what it will. As far as it asserts rotation of 
states of mind, I suppose it suggests its own 



156 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

remedy, namely, in the record of larger peri- 
ods. What is the mean of many states ; of all 
the states? Does the general voice of ages 
affirm any principle, or is no community of 
sentiment discoverable in distant times and 
places? And when it shows the power of self- 
interest, I accept that as a part of the divine 
law, and must reconcile it with aspiration the 
best I can. 

The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the 
sense of mankind, in all ages, — that the laws 
of the world do not always befriend, but often 
hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of 
Kinde or nature, grows over us like grass. 
We paint Time with a scythe ; Love and For- 
tune, blind ; and Destiny, deaf. We have too 
little power of resistance against this ferocity 
which champs us up. What front can we make 
against these unavoidable, victorious, malefi- 
cent forces? What can I do against the influ- 
ence of Race, in my history? What can I do 
against hereditary and constitutional habits, 
against scrofula, lymph, impotence? against 
climate, against barbarism, in my country? I 
can reason down or deny everything, except 
this perpetual Belly; feed he must and will, 
and I cannot make him respectable. 

But the main resistance which the affirmative 
impulse finds, and one including all others, is 
in the doctrine of the Illusionists. There is a 
painful rumor in circulation, that we have been 
practiced upon in all the principal perform- 
ances of life, and free agency is the emptiest 
name. We have been sopped and drugged 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 157 

with the air, with food, with woman, with chil- 
dren, with sciences, with events which leave 
lis exactly where they found us. The math- 
ematics, 'tis complained, leave the mind where 
they find it: so do all sciences; and so do all 
events and actions. I find a man who has 
passed through all the sciences, the churl he 
was; and, through all the offices, learned, civil, 
and social, can detect the child. We are not 
the less necessitated to dedicate life to them. 
In fact, we may come to accept it as the fixed 
rule and theory of our state of education, that 
God is a substance, and his method is illusion. 
The eastern sages owned the goddess Yogani- 
dra, the great illusory energy of Vishnu, by 
whom, as utter ignorance, the whole world is 
beguiled. 

Or, shall I state it thus? — The astonishment 
of life, is, the absence of any appearance of 
reconciliation between the theory and practice 
of life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law, 
is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and 
profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares 
and works which have no direct bearing on it; 
— is then lost, for months or years, and again 
found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we 
compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, 
have half a dozen reasonable hours. But what 
are these cares and works the better? A 
method in the world we do not see, but this 
parallelism of great and little, which never 
react on each other, nor discover the smallest 
tendency to converge. Experiences, fortunes, 
governings, readings, writings are nothing to 



158 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

the purpose ; as when a man comes into the 
room, it does not appear whether he has been 
fed on yams or buffalo, — he has contrived to 
get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out of 
rice or out of snow. So vast is the dispropor- 
tion between the sky of law and the pismire of 
performance under it, that, whether he is a 
man of worth or a sot, is not so great a matter 
as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this 
enchantment, the stunning non-intercourse law 
which makes cooperation impossible? The 
young spirit pants to enter society. But all 
the ways of culture and greatness lead to 
solitary imprisonment. He has been often 
baulked. He did not expect a sympathy with 
his thought from the village, but he went with 
it to the chosen and intelligent, and found no 
entertainment for it, but mere misapprehen- 
sion, distaste, and scoffing. Men are strangely 
mistimed and misapplied; and the excellence 
of each is an inflamed individualism which sep- 
arates him more. 

There are these, and more than these dis- 
eases of thought, which our ordinary teachers 
do not attempt to remove. Now shall we, be- 
cause a good nature inclines us to virtue's side, 
say. There are no doubts, — and lie for the 
right? Is life to be led in a brave or in a cow- 
ardly manner? and is not the satisfaction of the 
doubts essential to all manliness? Is the name 
of virtue to be a barrier to that which is vir- 
tue? Can you not believe that a man of ear- 
nest and burly habit may find small good in 
tea, essays, and catechism, and want a rougher 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 159 

instruction, want men, labor, trade, farming, 
war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt, and 
terror, to make things plain to him ; and has 
he not a right to insist on being convinced in 
his own way? When he is convinced, he will 
be worth the pains. 

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations 
of the soul ; unbelief in denying them. Some 
minds are incapable of skepticism. The doubts 
they profess to entertain are rather a civility or 
accommodation to the common discourse of 
their company. They may well give them- 
selves leave to speculate, for they are secure of 
a return. Once admitted to the heaven of 
thought, they see no relapse into night, but 
infinite invitation on the other side. Heaven 
is within heaven, and sky over sky, and they 
are encompassed with divinities. Others there 
are, to whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts 
down to the surface of the earth. It is a ques- 
tion of temperament, or of more or less immer- 
sion in nature. The last class must needs have 
a reflex or parasite faith ; not a sight of reali- 
ties, but an instinctive reliance on the seers 
and believers of realities. The manners and 
thoughts of believers astonish them, and con- 
vince them that these have seen something 
which is hid from themselves. But their sen- 
sual habit would fix the believer to his last 
position, whilst he as inevitably advances ; and 
presently the unbeliever, for love of belief, 
burns the believer. 

Great believers are always reckoned infidels, 
impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really 



160 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

men of no account. The spiritualist finds him- 
self driven to express his faith by a series of 
skepticisms. Charitable souls come with their 
projects, and ask his cooperation. How can 
he hesitate? It is the rule of mere comity and 
courtesy to agree where you can, and to turn 
your sentence with something auspicious, and 
not freezing and sinister. But he is forced to 
say, *'0, these things will be as they must be: 
what can you do? These particular griefs and 
crimes are the foliage and fruit of such trees 
as we see growing. It is vain to complain of 
the leaf or the berry: cut it off; it will bear 
another just as bad. You must begin your 
cure lower down." The generosities of the 
day prove an intractable element for him. 
The people's questions are not his; their meth- 
ods are not his; and, against all the dictates of 
good nature, he is driven to say, he has no 
pleasure in them. 

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, 
of the divine Providence, and of the immor- 
tality of the soul, his neighbors cannot put the 
statement so that he shall affirm it. But he 
denies out of more faith, and not less. He 
denies out of honesty. He had rather stand 
charged with the imbecility of skepticism, than 
with untruth. I believe, he says, in the moral 
design of the universe ; it exists hospitably for 
the weal of the souls; but your dogmas seem 
to me caricatures; why should I make believe 
them? Will any say, this is cold and infidel? 
The wise and » magnanimous will not say so. 
They will exult in his far-sighted good-will, 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 161 

that can abandon to the adversary all the 
ground of tradition and common belief, with- 
out losing a jot of strength. It sees to the end 
of, all transgression. George Fox saw "that 
there was an ocean of darkness and death ; but 
withal, an infinite ocean of light and love 
which flowed over that of darkness." 

The final solution in which skepticism is lost 
is in the moral sentiment, which never forfeits 
its supremacy. All moods may be safely tried, 
and their weight allowed to all objections: the 
m-oral sentiment as easily outweighs them all, 
as any one. This is the drop which balances 
the sea. I play with the miscellany of facts, 
and take those superficial views which we call 
skepticism ; but I know that they will presently 
appear to me in that order which makes skep- 
ticism impossible. A man of thought must feel 
the thought that is parent of the universe, that 
the masses of nature do undulate and flow. 

This faith avails to the whole emergency of 
life and objects. The world is saturated with 
deity and with law. He is content with just 
and unjust, with sots and fools, with the tri- 
umph of folly and fraud. He can behold with 
serenity the yawning gulf between the ambi- 
tion of man and his power of performance, be- 
tween the demand and supply of power, which 
makes the tragedy of all souls. 

Charles Fourier announced that "the attrac- 
tions of man are proportioned to his destinies;" 
in other words, that every desire predicts its 
own satisfaction. Yet, all experience exhibits 
the reverse of this; the incompetency of power 

11 Representative Men 



162 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

is the universal grief of young and ardent 
minds. They accuse the divine Providence of 
a certain parsimony. It has shown the heaven 
and earth to every child, and filled him with a 
desire for the whole; a desire raging, infinite; 
a hunger, as of space to be filled with plan- 
ets; a cry of famine, as of devils for souls. 
Then for the satisfaction, — to each man is ad- 
ministered a single drop, a bead of dew of vital 
power per day, — a cup as large as space, and 
one drop of the water of life in it. Each man 
woke in the morning, with an appetite that 
could eat the solar system like a cake; a spirit 
for action and passion without bounds; he 
could lay his hand on the morning star ; he 
could try conclusions with gravitation or chem- 
istry ; but, on the first motion to prove his 
strength — hands, feet, senses, gave way, and 
would not serve him. He was an emperor 
deserted by his states, and left to whistle by 
himself, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all 
whistling: and still the sirens sang, "The 
attractions are proportioned to the destinies." 
In every house, in the heart of each maiden, 
and of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, 
this chasm is found, — between the largest 
promise of ideal power, and the shabby expe- 
rience. 

The expansive nature of truth comes to our 
succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man 
helps himself by larger generalizations. The 
lesson of life is practically to generalize ; to 
believe what the years and the centuries say 
against the hours ; to resist the usurpation of 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 163 

particulars ; to penetrate to their catholic sense. 
Things seem to say one thing, and say the re- 
verse. The appearance is immoral; the result 
is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to 
justify despondency, to promote rogues, to 
defeat the just ; and, by knaves, as by martyrs, 
the just cause is carried forward. Although 
knaves win in every political struggle, although 
society seems to be delivered over from the 
hands of one set of criminals into the hands of 
another set of criminals, as fast as the govern- 
ment is changed, and the march of civilization 
is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are 
somehow answered. We see, now, events 
forced on, which seem to retard or retrograde 
the civility of ages. But the world-spirit is 
a good swimmer, and storms and waves can- 
not drown him. He snaps his finger at laws; 
and so, throughout history, heaven seems to 
affect low and poor means. Through the 
years and the centuries, through evil agents, 
through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent 
tendency irresistibly streams. 

Let a man learn to look for the permanent 
in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to 
bear the disappearance of things he was wont 
to reverence, without losing his reverence ; let 
him learn that he is here, not to work, but to 
be worked upon ; and that, though abyss open 
under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all 
are at last contained in the Eternal cause. — 

*Tf my bark sink, 'tis to another sea." 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 



165 



V. 
SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 



Great men are more distinguished by range 
and extent than by originality. If we require 
the originality which consists in weaving, like 
a spider, their web from their own bowels; 
in finding clay, and making bricks and build- 
ing the house, no great men are original. Nor 
does valuable originality consist in unlikeness 
to other men. The hero is in the press of 
knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing 
what men want, and sharing their desire, he 
adds the needful length of sight and of arm, to 
come at the desired point. The greatest 
genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no 
rattlebrain, saving what comes uppermost, 
and, because he says everything, saying, at 
last, something good; but a heart in unison 
with his time and country. There is nothing 
whimsical and fantastic in his production, but 
sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the 
weightiest convictions, and pointed with the 
mosl determined aim which any man or class 
knov/s of in his times. 

The Genius of our life is jealous of individu- 
als, and will not have any individual great, 
except through the general. There is no 



167 



168 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

choice to genius. A great man does not wake 
up on some fine morning, and say, "I am full 
of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic 
continent: to-day I will square the circle: I 
will ransack botany, and find a new food for 
man : I have a new architecture in my mind : 
I foresee a new mechanic power;" no, but he 
finds himself in the river of the thoughts and 
events, forced onward by the ideas and necessi- 
ties of his contemporaries. He stands where all 
the eyes of men look one way, and their hands 
all point in the direction in which he should 
go. The church has reared him amidst rites 
and pomps, and he carries out the advice which 
her music gave him, and builds a cathedral 
needed by her chants and processions. He 
finds a war raging : it educates him by trum- 
pet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. 
He finds two counties groping to bring coal, 
or flour, or fish, from the place of production 
to the place of consumption, and he hits on a 
railroad. Every master has found his mate- 
rials collected, and his power lay in his sympa- 
thy with his people, and in his love of the 
materials he wrought in. What an economy 
of power! and what a compensation for the 
shortness of life ! All is done to his hand. 
The world has brought him thus far on his way. 
The human race has gone out before him, 
sunk the hills, filled the hollows, and bridged 
the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, 
women, all have worked for him, and he en- 
ters into their labors. Choose any other thing, 
out of the line of tendency, out of the national 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 1C9 

feeling and history, and he would have all to 
do for himself : his powers would be expended 
in the first preparations. Great genial power, 
one would almost say, consists in not being 
original at all ; in being altogether receptive ; 
in letting the world do all, and suffering the 
spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through 
the mind. 

Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the 
English people were importunate for dramatic 
entertainments. The court took offence easily 
at political allusions, and attempted to suppress 
them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic 
party, and the religious among the Anglican 
church, would suppress them. But the people 
wanted them. Inn- yards, houses without 
roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at 
country fairs, were the ready theatres of stroll- 
ing players. The people had tasted this new 
joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress 
newspapers now, — no, not by the strongest 
party, — neither then could king, prelate, or 
puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, 
which was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, 
lecture, punch, and library, at the same time. 
Probably king, prelate and puritan, all found 
their own account in it. It had become, by all 
causes, a national interest, — by no means con- 
spicuous, so that some great scholar would 
have thought of treating it in an English his- 
tory, — but not a whit less considerable, be- 
cause it was cheap, and of no account, like a 
baker's-shop. The best proof of its vitality is 
the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into 

12 Representative Men 



170 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, 
Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middle- 
ton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and 
Fletcher. 

The secure possession, by the stage, of the 
public mind, is of the first importance to the 
poet who works for it. He loses no time in 
idle experiments. Here is audience and ex- 
pectation prepared. In the case of Shak- 
speare there is much more. At the time when 
he left Stratford, and went up to London, a 
greaty body of stage-plays, of all dates and 
writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn 
produced on the boards. Here is the Tale of 
Troy, which the audience will bear hearing 
some part of every week; the Death of Julius 
Caesar, and other stories out of Plutarch, which 
they never tire of; a shelf full of English his- 
tory, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, 
down to the royal Henries, which men hear 
eagerly; and a string of doleful tragedies, 
merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, 
which all the London 'prentices know. AH the 
mass has been treated, with more or less skill, 
by every playwright, and the prompter has the 
soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no 
longer possible to say who wrote them first. 
They have been the property of the Theatre so 
long, and so many rising geniuses have en- 
larged or altered them, inserting a speech, or 
a whole scene, or adding a song, that no man 
can any longer claim copyright on this work of 
numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They 
are not yet desired in that way. We have few 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 171 

readers, many spectators and hearers. They 
had best lie where they are. 

Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, 
esteemed the mass of old plays, w^aste stock, 
in which any experiment could be freely tried. 
Had the prestige which hedges about a modern 
tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. 
The rude warm blood of the living England 
circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and 
gave body which he v\-anted to his airy and 
majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in 
popular tradition on v;hich he may work, and 
which, again, may restrain his art within the 
due temperance. It holds him to the people, 
supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in 
furnishing so much work done to his hand, 
leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for 
the audacities of his imagination. In short, 
the poet owes to his legend what sculpture 
owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and 
in Greece, grew up in subordination to archi- 
tecture. It was the ornament of the temple 
wall: at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, 
then the relief became bolder, and a head or 
arm was projected from the wall, the groups 
being still arrayed with reference to the build- 
ing, which serves also as a frame to hold the 
figures; and when, at last, the greatest free- 
dom of style and treatment was reached, the 
prevailing genius of architecture still enforced 
a certain calmness and continence in the statue. 
As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and 
with no reference to the temple or palace, the 
art began to decline : freak, extravagance, and 



172 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

exhibition, took the place of the old temper- 
ance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor 
found in architecture, the perilous irritabilit}^ 
of poetic talent found in the accumulated dra- 
matic materials to which the people were 
already wonted, and which had a certain excel- 
lence which no single genius, however extra- 
ordinary, could hope to create. 

In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare 
did owe debts in all directions, and was able to 
use whatever he found; and the amount of 
indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's 
laborious computations in regard to the First, 
Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in 
which, ''out of 6043 lines, 17 71 were written 
by some author preceding Shakspeare; 2373 by 
him, on the foundation laid by his predeces- 
sors; and 1899 were entirely his own." And 
the preceding investigation hardly leaves a 
single drama of his absolute invention. 
Malone's sentence is an important piece of 
external history. In Henry VIII., I think I 
see plainly the cropping out of the original rock 
on which his own finer stratum was laid. The 
first play was written by a superior, thoughtful 
man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, 
and know well their cadence. See Wolsey's 
soliloquy, and the following scene with Crom- 
well, where, — instead of the metre of Shaks- 
peare, whose secret is, that the thought con- 
structs the tune, so that reading for the sense 
will best bring out the rhythm, — here the lines 
are constructed on a given tune, and the verse 
has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 113 

play contains, through all its length, numis- 
takable traits of Shakspeare's hand, and some 
passages, as the account of the coronation^ are 
like autographs. What is odd, the compliment 
to Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm. 

Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a 
better fable that any invention can. If he lost 
any credit of design, he augmented his re- 
sources; and, at that day our petulant demand 
for originality was not so much pressed. There 
was no literature for the million. The uni- 
versal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. 
A great poet, who appears in illiterate times, 
absorbs into his sphere all the light which is 
anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jevizel, 
every flower of sentiment, it is his fine office 
to bring to his people ; and he comes to value 
his memory equally with his invention. He is 
therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts 
have been derived ; whether through transla- 
tion, whether through tradition, whether by 
travel in distant countries, whether by inspira- 
tion; from whatever source, they are equally 
welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he 
borrows very near home. Other men say wise 
things as well as he; only they say a good 
many foolish things, and do not know when 
they have spoken wisely. He knows the 
sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high 
place, wherever he finds it. Such is the 
happy position of Homer, perhaps ; of Chaucer,, 
of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. 
And they are librarians and historiographers, 
as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and 



174 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

dispenser of all the hundred tales of the 
world, — 

"Presenting Thebes' and Pelops* line 
And the tale of Troy divine." 

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all 
our early literature; and, more recently, not 
only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to 
him, but, in the whole society of English 
writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily 
traced. One is charmed with the opulence 
which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer 
rs a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew 
Continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, 
from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance 
of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation 
from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statins. 
Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Provencal 
poets, are his benefactors: the Romaunt of the 
Rose is only judicious translation from William 
of Lorris and John of Meun : Troilus and Cre- 
seide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and 
the Fox, from the Lais of Marie: The House 
of Fame, from the French or Italian: and poor 
Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln 
or stone- quarry out of which to build his house. 
He steals by this apology, — that what he takes 
has no worth where he finds it, and the great- 
est where he leaves it. It has come to be prac- 
tically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, 
having once shown himself capable of original 
writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from 
the writings of others at discretion. Thought 
is the property of him w^ho can entertain it; 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 175 

and of him who can adequately place it A 
certain awkwardness marks the use of bor- 
rowed thoughts; but, as soon as we have 
learned what to do with them, they become 
our own. 

Thus, all originality is relative. Every 
thinker is retrospective. The learned member 
of the legislature, at Westminster, or at Wash- 
ington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show 
us the constituency, and the now invisible 
channels by which the senator is made aware 
of their wishes, the crowd of practical and 
knowing men, who, by correspondence or con- 
versation, are feeding him with evidence, anec- 
dotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his 
fine attitude and resistance of something of 
their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and 
Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau 
think for thousands ; and so there were foun- 
tains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Mil- 
ton, from v/hich they drew; friends, lovers, 
books, traditions, proverbs, — all perished, — 
which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. 
Did the bard speak with authority? Did he 
feel himself overmatched by any companion? 
The appeal is to the consciousness of the 
writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delhi 
whereof to ask; concerning any thought or thing, 
whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to 
have answer, and to rely on that? All the debt 
which such a man could contract to other wit, 
would never disturb his consciousness of origi- 
nality: for the ministrations of books, and of 



176 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Other minds, are a whiff of smoke to that most 
private reality with which he has conversed. 

It is easy to see that what is best written or 
done by genius, in the world, was no man's 
work, but came by wide social labor, when a 
thousand wrought like one, sharing the same 
impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful 
specimen of the strength and music of the Eng- 
lish language. But it was not made by one 
man, or at one time; but centuries and 
churches brought it to perfection. There 
never was a time when there was not some 
translation existing. The Liturgy, admired 
for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of 
the piety of ages and nations, a translation of 
the prayers and forms of the Catholic church, 
— these collected, too, in long periods, from 
the prayers and meditations of every saint and 
sacred writer, all over the world. Grotius 
makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's 
Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is 
composed were already in use, in the time of 
Christ, in the rabbinical forms. He picked 
out the grains of gold. The nervous language 
of the Common Law, the impressive forms of 
our courts, and the precision and substantial 
truth of the legal distinctions, are the contri- 
bution of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded 
men who have lived in the countries where 
these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch 
gets its excellence by being translation on 
translation. There never was a time when there 
was none. All the truly diomatic and national 
phrases are kept, and all others successively 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 177 

picked out and thrown away. Something like 
the same process had gone on, long before, 
with the originals of these books. The world 
takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, 
^sop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, 
Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not 
the work of single men. In the composition 
of such works, the time thinks, the market 
thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, 
the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every 
book supplies its time with one good word ; 
every municipal law, every trade, every folly 
of the day, and the generic catholic genius who 
is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality 
to the originality of all, stands with the next 
age as the recorder and embodiment of his 
own. . , 

We have to thank the researches of antiqua- 
ries, and the Shakspeare Society, for ascer- 
taining the steps of the English drama, from 
the Mj^steries celebrated in churches and by 
churchmen, and the final detachment from the 
church, and the completion of secular plays, 
from Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gur- 
ton's Needle, down to the possession of the 
stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare 
altered, remodelled, and finally made his own. 
Elated with success, and piqued by the grow- 
ing interest of the problem, they have left no 
book- stall unsearched, no chest in a garret un- 
opened, no file of old yellow accounts to decom- 
pose in damp and worms, so keen was the 
hope to discover whether the boy Shakspeare 
poached or not, whether he held horses at the 



178 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

theater door, whether he kept school, and why- 
he left in his will only his second-best bed to 
Ann Hathaway, his wife. 

There is somewhat touching in the madness 
with which the passing age mischooses the 
object on which all candles shine, and all eyes 
are turned; the care with which it registers 
every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth, and 
King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, 
Burleighs, and Buckinghams; and let pass 
without a single valuable note the founder of 
another dynasty, which alone will cause the 
Tudor dynasty to be remembered, — the man 
who carries the Saxon race in him by the in- 
spiration which feeds him, and on whose 
thoughts the foremost people of the world are 
now for some ages to be nourished, and minds 
to receive this and not another bias. A popu- 
lar player, — nobody suspected he was the poet 
of the human race ; and the secret was kept as 
faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as 
from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, 
who took the inventory of the human under- 
standing for his times, never mentioned his 
name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained 
his few words of regard and panegyric, had no 
suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibra- 
tions he was attempting. He no doubt thought 
the praise he has conceded to him generous, 
and esteemed himself, out of all question, the 
better poet of the two. 

If it need wit to know wit, according to the 
proverb, Shakspeare's time should be capable 
of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born 



REPPvESENTATlVE MEN. 179 

four years after Shakspeare, and died twenty- 
three years after him; and I find among- his 
correspondents and acquaintances, the follow- 
ing persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, 
Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, 
Sir Walter Rale'igh, John Milton, Sir Henry 
Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham 
Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John 
Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Yieta, Albericus 
Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Ariminius; with all of 
whom exist some token of his having communi- 
cated, without enumerating many others, whom 
doubtless he saw, — Shakspeare, Spenser, Jon- 
son, Beaumont, Massinger, two' Herberts, 
Marlow, Chapman, and the rest. Since the 
constellation of great men w^ho appeared in 
Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never 
any such society ; — yet their genius failed them 
to find out the best head in the universe. Our 
poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot 
see the mountain near. It took a century to 
make it suspected; and not until two centuries 
had passed, after his death, did any criticism 
which we think adequate begin to appear. It 
was not possible to write the history of Shaks- 
peare till now ; for he is the father of German 
literature: it was on the introduction of 
Shakspeare into German by Lessing, and the 
translation of his works by Wieland and Schle- 
gel, that the rapid burst of German literature 
was most intimately connected. It was not 
until the nineteenth century, whose speculative 
genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the 
tragedy of Hamlet should find such wondering 



180 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

readers. Now, literature, i<;hilosophy, and 
thought are Shakspearized. His mind is the 
horizon beyond which, at present, we do not 
see. Our ears are educated to music by his 
rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only 
critics who have expressed our convictions with 
any adequate fidelity : but there is in all culti- 
vated minds a silent appreciation of his super- 
lative power and beauty, which, like Christi- 
anity, qualifies the period. 

The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all 
directions, advertised the missing facts, offered 
money for any information that will lead to 
proof; and with what results? Beside some 
important illustration of the history of the Eng- 
lish stage, to which I have adverted, they have 
gleaned a few facts touching the property, and 
dealings in regard to property, of the poet. It 
appears that, from year to year, he owned a 
larger share in the Blackfriars' Theater: its 
wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: 
that he bought an estate in his native village, 
with his earnings, as writer and shareholder ; 
that he lived in the best house in Stratford ; 
was intrusted by his neighbors with their com- 
missions in London, as of borrowing money, 
and the like ; that he was a veritable farmer. 
About the time when he was writing Macbeth, 
he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of 
Stratford, for thirty-five shillings ten pence, 
for corn delivered to him at different times; 
and, in all respects, appears as a good husband, 
with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. 
He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 181 

and shareholder in the theater, not in any 
striking manner distinguished from other act- 
ors and managers. I admit the importance 
of this information. It was well worth the 
pains that have been taken to procure it. 

But whatever scraps of information concern- 
ing his condition these researches may have 
rescued, they can shed no light upon that infi- 
nite invention which is the concealed magnet 
of his attraction for us. We are very clumsy 
writers of history. We tell the chronicle of 
parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, school- 
mates, earning of money, marriage, publication 
of books, celebrity, death ; and when we have 
come to an end of this gossip, no ray of rela- 
tion appears between it and the goddess-born; 
and it seems as if, had we dipped at random 
into the "Modem Plutarch," and read any 
other life there, it would have fitted the poems 
as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring, 
like fhe rainbow daughter of Wonder, from 
the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all 
history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Col- 
lier, have wasted their oil. The famed thea- 
ters, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, 
and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, 
Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready, dedi- 
cate their lives to this genius ; him they crown, 
elucidate, obey, and express. The genius 
knows them not. The recitation begins; one 
golden word leaps out immortal from all this 
painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us 
with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. 
I remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of 



182 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

a famed performer, the pride of the English 
stage ; and all I then heard, and all I now re- 
member, of the tragedian, was that in which 
the tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet's 
question to the ghost, — 

"What may this mean, 
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel 
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?" 

That imagination which dilates the closet he 
writes into the world's dimension, crowds it 
with agents in rank and order, as quickly re- 
duces the big reality to be the glimpses of the 
moon. These tricks of his magic spoil for us 
the illusions of the green-room. Can any biog- 
raphy shed light on the localities into which 
the Midsummer Night's Dream admits me? 
Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or par- 
ish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Strat- 
ford, the genesis of that delicate creation? 
The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone 
Castle, the moonlight of Portia's villa, "the 
antres vast and desarts idle, ' ' of Othello's cap- 
tivity, — where is the third cousin, or grand- 
nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts, or 
private letter, that has kept one word of those 
transcendent secrets. In fine, in this drama, 
as in all great works of art, — in the Cyclopaeah 
architecture of Egypt and India; in the Phi- 
dian sculpture; the Gothic minsters; the 
Italian painting; the Ballads of Spain and 
Scotland, — the Genius draws up the ladder 
after him, when the creative age goes up to 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 183 

heaven, and gives way to a new, who see the 
works, and ask in vain for a history. 
^ Shakspeare is the only biographer of 
Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, 
except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our 
most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.-^ He 
cannot step from off his tripod, and give us 
anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique 
documents extricated, analyzed, and compared, 
by the assiduous Dyce and Collier; and now 
read one of those skyey sentences, — aerolites, 
— which seem to have fallen out of heaven, and 
which, not your experience, but the man with- 
in the breast, has accepted as words of fate ; and 
tell me if they match ; if the former account in 
any manner for the latter; or, which gives the 
most historical insight into the man. 

Hence, though our external history is so 
meager, yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, 
instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really 
the information which is material, that which 
describes character and fortune; that which, 
if we were about to meet the man and deal 
with him, would most import us to know. We 
have his recorded convictions on those ques- 
tions which knock for answer at every heart, — 
on life and death, on love, on wealth and pov- 
erty, on the prizes of life, and the ways where- 
by we may come at them; on the characters 
of men, and the influences, occult and open, 
which affect their fortunes : and on those mys- 
terious and demoniacal powers which defy our 
science, and which yet interweave their malice 
and their gift in our brightest hours. Who 



\ 



184 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

ever read the volume of Sonnets, without find- 
ing that the poet had there revealed, under 
masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the 
lore of friendship and of love ; the confusion 
of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at 
the same time, the most intellectual of men? 
What trait of his private mind has he hidden 
in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample 
pictures of the gentleman and the king, what 
forms and humanities pleased him ; his delight 
in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in 
cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, 
let Antonio the merchant, answer for his great 
heart. \vSo far from Shakspeare being the 
least known, he is the one person, in all mod> 
em history, known to us. What point of mor- 
als, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of 
religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he 
not settled? W^hat mystery has he not signified 
his knowledge of? What office or function, or 
district of man's work, has he not remembered? 
What king has he not taught state, as Talma 
taught Napoleon? What maiden has not 
found him finer than her delicacy? What lover 
has he not outloved? What sage has he not 
outseen? V/hat gentleman has he not in- 
structed in the rudeness of his behavior? \ 

Some able and appreciating critics think no 
criticism on Shakspeare valuable, that does not 
rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is 
falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I 
think as highly as these critics of his dramatic 
merit, but still think it secondary. He was a 
full man, who liked to talk ; a brain exhaling 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 185 

thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, 
found the drama next at hand. Had he been 
less, we should have had to consider how well 
he filled his place, how good a dramatist he 
was, — and he is the best in the world. But it 
turns out, that what he has to say is of that 
weight, as to withdraw some attention from 
the vehicle ; and he is like some saint whose 
history is to be rendered into all languages, 
into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, 
and cut up into proverbs ; so that the occasions 
which gave the saint's meaning the form of a 
conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of 
laws, is immaterial compared with the univer- 
sality of its application. So it fares with the 
wise Shakspeare and his book of life. He 
wrote the airs for all our modern music : he 
wrote the text of modern life ; the text of man- 
ners: he drew the man of England and Eur- 
ope; the father of the man in America: 
he drew the man and described the day, and 
what is done in it: he read the hearts of men 
and women, their probity, and their second 
thought, and wiles; the wiles of innocence, 
and the transitions by which virtues and vices 
slide into their contraries: he could divide the 
mother's part from the father's part in the 
face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations 
of freedom and fate: he knew the laws of 
repression which make the police of nature: 
and all the sweets and all the terrors of human 
lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the 
landscape lies on the eye. And the importance 
of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of 



186 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like mak- 
ing a question concerning the paper on which 
a king's message is written. 

Shakspeare is as much out of the category of 
eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. 
He is inconceivably wise ; the others, conceiv- 
ably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into 
Plato's brain, and think from thence; but not 
into Shakspeare's. We are still out of doors. 
For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare 
is unique. No man can imagine it better. He 
was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible 
with an individual self, — the subtilest of 
authors, and only just within the possibility of 
authorship. With this wisdom of life, is the 
equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric 
power. He clothed the creatures of his legend 
with form and sentiments, as if they were 
people who had lived under his roof; and few 
real men have left such distinct characters 
as these fictions. And they spoke in language 
as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never 
seduced him into an ostentation, nor did he 
harp on one string. An omnipresent human- 
ity co-ordinates all his faculties. 1 Give a man 
of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will 
presently appear. He has certain observations, 
opinions, topics, which have some accidental 
prominence, and which he disposes all to ex- 
hibit. He crams this part, and starves that other 
part, consulting not the fitness 9f the thing, 
but his fitness and strength. ,But Shaks- 
peare has no peculiarity, no importunate 
topic ; but all is duly given ; no veins, no curi- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 187 

osities: no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no 
mannerist is he: he has no discoverable ego- 
tism : the great he tells greatly ; the small sub- 
ordinately. He is wise without emphasis or 
assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, 
who lifts the land into mountain slopes without 
effort, and by the same rule as she floats a 
bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the 
one as the other. This makes that equality of 
power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love- 
songs ; a merit so incessant, that each reader 
is incredulous of the perception of other read- 
ers. I 

This power of expression, or of transferring 
the inmost truth of things into music and 
verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has 
added a new problem to metaphysics. This is 
that which throws him into natural history, as 
a main production of the globe, and as an- 
nouncing new eras and ameliorations. Things 
were mirrored in his poetry without loss or 
blur: he could paint the fine with precision, 
the great with compass ; the tragic and comic 
indifferently, and without any distortion or 
favor. He carried his powerful execution into 
minute details, to a hair point ; finishes an eye- 
lash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a moun- 
tain; and yet these like nature's, will bear the 
scrutiny of the solar microscope. 

In short, he is the chief example to prove 
that more or less of production, more or fewer 
pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the 
power to make one picture. Daguerre learned 
how to let one flower etch its image on his 



188 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

plate of iodine ; and then proceeds at leisure to 
etch a million. There are always objects; but 
there was never representation. Here is per- 
fect representation, at last; and now let the 
world of figures sit for their portraits. No 
recipe can be given for the making of a Shaks- 
peare ; but the possibility of the translation of 
things into song is demonstrated. 

His lyric power lies in the genius of the 
piece. The sonnets, though their excellence 
is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as 
inimitable as they : and it is not a merit of 
lines, but a total merit of the piece ; like the 
tone of voice of some incomparable person, so 
is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause 
as unproducible now as a whole poem. 

Though the speeches in the plays, and single 
lines, have a beauty which tempts the ear to 
pause on them for their euphuism, yet the sen- 
tence is so loaded with meaning, and so linked 
with its foregoers and followers, that the logi- 
cian is satisfied. His means are as admirable 
as his ends; every subordinate invention, by 
which he helps himself to connect some irrecon- 
cilable opposites, is a poem too. He is not re- 
duced to dismount and w^alk, because his horses 
are running off with him in some distant direc- 
tion : he always rides. 

The finest poetry was first experience : but 
the thought has suffered a transformation since 
it was an experience. Cultivated men often 
attain a good degree of skill in writing verses; 
but it is easy to read, through their poems, 
their personal history: any one acquainted 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 189 

with parties can name every figure : this is 
Andrew, and that is Rachel. The sense thus 
remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, 
and not yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind, 
the fact has gone quite over into the new ele- 
ment of thought, and has lost all that is exu- 
vial. This generosity abides with Shakspeare. 
We say, from the truth and closeness of his 
pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. 
Yet there is not a trace of egotism. 

One more royal trait properly belongs to the 
poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which 
no man can be a poet, — for beauty is his aim. 
He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for 
its grace: he delights in the world, in man, in 
woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from 
them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, 
he sheds over the universe. Epicurus relates, 
that poetry hath such charms that a lover 
might forsake his mistress to partake of them. 
And the true bards have been noted for their 
firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies in sun- 
shine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi 
says, "It was rumored abroad that I was peni- 
tent; but what had I to do with repentance?" 
Not less vSovereign and cheerful, — much 
more sovereign and cheerful is the tone of 
Shakspeare. His name suggests joy and eman- 
cipation to the heart of men. If he should ap- 
pear in any company of human souls, who 
would not march in his troop? He touches 
nothing that does not borrow health and lon- 
gevity from his festive style. 

And now, how stands the account of man 



190 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

with this bard and benefactor, when in soli- 
tude, shutting our ears to the reverberations 
of his fame, we seek to strike the balance? 
Solitude has austere lessons; it can teach us to 
spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs 
Shakspeare also, and finds him to share the 
halfness and imperfections of humanity. 

Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw 
the splendor of meaning that plays over the 
visible world; knew that a tree had another 
use than for apples, and corn another than for 
meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage 
and roads: that these things bore a second and 
finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of 
its thoughts, and conveying in all their natural 
history a certain mute commentary on human 
life. Shakspeare employed them as colors to 
compose his picture. He rested in their beauty ; 
and never took the step which seemed inevit- 
able to such genius, namely, to explore the 
virtue which resides in these symbols, and im- 
parts this power, — what is that which they 
themselves say? He converted the elements, 
which waited on his command, into entertain- 
ments. He was master of the revels to man- 
kind. Is it not as if one should have, through 
majestic powers of science, the comets given 
into his hand, or the planets and their moons, 
and should draw them from their orbits to 
glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday 
night, and advertise in all towns, "very superior 
pyrotechny this evening!" Are the agents of 
nature, and the power to understand them, 
worth no more than a street serenade, or the 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 191 

breath of a cigar? One remembers again the 
trumpet-text in the Koran — ''The heavens and 
the earth, and all that is between them, think 
ye we have created them in jest?" As long as 
the question is of talent and mental power, the 
world of men has not his equal to show. But 
when the question is to life, and its materials, 
and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? 
What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth 
Night, or Midsummer-Night's Dream, or a 
Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another 
picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict 
of the Shakspeare Societies comes to mind, 
that he was a jovial actor and manager. I can- 
not marry this fact to his verse. Other admir- 
able men have led lives in some sort of keep- 
ing with their thought; but this man, in wide 
contrast. Had he been less, had he reached 
only the common measure of great authors, of 
Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might 
leave the fact in the twilight of human fate : 
but, that this man of men, he who gave to the 
science of mind a new and larger subject than 
had ever existed, and planted the standard of 
humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos, — 
that he should not be wise for himself, — it 
must even go into the world's history, that the 
best poet led an obscure and profane life, 
using his genius for the public amusement. 

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, 
German, and Swede, beheld the same objects: 
they also saw through them that which was 
contained. And to what purpose? The beauty 
straightway vanishes; they read command- 



192 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

ments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an 
obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, 
fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, 
a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered 
round with doleful histories of Adam's fall and 
curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purga- 
torial and penal fires before us ; and the heart 
of the seer and the heart of the listener sank 
in them. 

It must be conceded that these are half- views 
of half-men. The world still wants its poet- 
priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with 
Shakspeare the player, nor shall grope in 
graves with Swedenborg the mourner; but 
who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspi- 
ration. For knowledge will brighten the 
sunshine ; right is more beautiful than private 
affection ; and love is compatible with universal 
wisdom. 



JoHANN Wolfgang von Goethe. 

Representative Men. 



NAPOLEON; 
OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 



13 Representative Men 193 



VI. 

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE 
WORLD. 



Among the eminent persons of the nine- 
teenth century, Bonaparte is far the best 
known, and the most powerful ; and owes his 
predominance to the fidelity with which he 
expresses the tone of thought and belief, the 
aims of the masses of active and cultivated 
men. It is Swedenborg's theory, that every 
organ is made up of homogeneous particles ; 
or, as it is sometimes expressed, every whole 
is made of similars; that is, the lungs are 
composed of infinitely small lungs; the liver, 
of infinitely small livers; the kidney, of little 
kidneys, etc. Following this analogy, if any 
man is found to carry with him the power and 
affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is 
France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because 
the people whom he sways are little Napoleons. 

In our society, there is a standing antago- 
nism between the conservative and the demo- 
cratic classes; between those who have made 
their fortunes, and the young and the poor who 
have fortunes to make ; between the interests 
195 



196 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

of dead labor, — that is, the labor of hands long 
ago still in the grave, which labor is now en- 
tombed in money stocks, or in land and build- 
ings owned by idle capitalists, — and the inter- 
ests of living labor, which seeks to possess 
itself of land, and buildings, and money stocks. 
The first class is timid, selfish, illiberal, hating 
innovation, and continually losing numbers by 
death. The second class is selfish also, en- 
croaching, bold, self-relying, always outnum- 
bering the other, and recruiting its numbers 
every hour by births. It desires to keep open 
every avenue to the competition of all, and to 
multiply avenues; — the class of business men 
in America, in England, in France, and through- 
out Europe; the class of industry and skill. 
Napoleon is its representative. The instinct 
of active, brave, able men, throughout the 
middle class everywhere, has pointed out Na- 
poleon as the incarnate Democrat. He had 
their virtues, and their vices; above all, he 
had their spirit or aim. That tendency is 
material, pointing at a sensual success, and 
employing the richest and most various means 
to that end; conversant with mechanical pow- 
ers, highly intellectual, widely and accurately 
learned and skilful, but subordinating all intel- 
lectual and spiritual forces into means to a 
material success. To be the rich man, is the 
end. "God has granted," says the Koran, "to 
every people a prophet in its own tongue." 
Paris, and London, and New York, the spirit 
of commerce, of money, and material power, 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 197 

were also to have their prophet; and Bona- 
parte was qualified and sent. 

Every one of the million readers of anec- 
dotes, or memoirs, or lives of Napoleon, de- 
lights in the page, because he studies in it his 
own history. Napoleon is thoroughly modern, 
and, at the highest point of his fortunes, has 
the very spirit of the newspapers. He is no 
saint, — to use his own word, "no capuchin, " 
and he is no hero, in the high sense. The man 
in the street finds in him the qualities and 
powers of other men in the street. He finds 
him, like himself, by birth a citizen, who, by 
very intelligible merits, arrived at such a com- 
manding position, that he could indulge all 
those tastes which the common man possesses, 
but is obliged to conceal and deny; good soci- 
ety, good books, fast traveling, dress, dinners, 
servants without number, personal weight, the 
execution of his ideas, the standing in the atti- 
tude of a benefactor to all persons about him, 
the refined enjoyments of pictures, statues, 
music, palaces, and conventional honors, — 
precisely what is agreeable to the heart of 
every man in the nineteenth century, — this 
powerful man possessed. 

It is true that a man of Napoleon's truth of 
adaptation to the- mind of the masses around 
him becomes not merely representative, but 
actually a monopolizer and usurper of other 
minds. Thus Mirabeau plagiarized every 
good thought, every good word, that was 
spoken in France. Dumont relates that he sat 
in the gallery of the Convention, and heard 



198 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Mirabeau make a speech. It struck Dumont 
that he could fit it with a peroration, which he 
wrote in pencil immediately, and showed to 
Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord Elgin 
approved it, and Dumont, in the evening, 
showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau read it, 
pronounced it admirable, and declared he 
would incorporate it into his harangue, to-mor- 
row, to the Assembly. "It is impossible," said 
Dumont, "as, unfortunately, I have shown it 
to Lord Elgin." "If you have shown it to 
Lord Elgin, and to fifty persons beside, I shall 
still speak it to-morrow:" and he did speak it, 
with much effect, at the next day's session. 
For Mirabeau, with his overpowering person- 
ality, felt that these things, which his presence 
inspired, were as much his own, as if he had 
said them, and that his adoption of them gave 
them their weight. Much more absolute and 
centralizing was the successor to Mirabeau's 
popularity, and to much more than his pre- 
dominance in France. Indeed, a man of Napo- 
leon's stamp almost ceases to have a private 
speech and opinion. He is so largely recep- 
tive, and is so placed, that he comes to be a 
bureau for all the intelligence, wit, and power, 
of the age and country. He gains the battle ; 
he makes the code; he makes the system of 
weights and measures; he levels the Alps; he 
builds the road. All distinguished engineers, 
savants, statists, report to him ; so likewise do 
all good heads in every kind ; he adopts the 
best measures, sets his stamp on them, and 
not these alone, but on every happy and mem- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 199 

orable expression. Every sentence spoken by 
Napoleon, and every line of his writing, de- 
serves reading, as it is the sense of France. 

Bonaparte was the idol of common men, be- 
cause he had in transcendent degree the qual- 
ities and powers of common men. There is a 
certain satisfaction in coming down to the 
lowest ground of politics, for we get rid ot 
cant and hypocrisy. Bonaparte wrought m 
common with that great class he represented, 
for power and wealth,— but Bonaparte, spe- 
cially, without any scruple as to the means. 
All the sentiments which embarrass men s 
pursuit of these objects, he set aside. 1 he 
sentiments were for women and children. 
Fontanes, in 1804, expressed Napoleon s own 
sense, when, in behalf of the Senate, he ad- 
dressed him,— "Sire, the desire of perfection is 
the worst disease that ever afaicted the human 
mind " The advocates of liberty, and of pro- 
gress, are 'ideologists;"— a word of contempt 
often in his mouth ;— ' ' Necker is an ideologist : 
"Lafayette is an ideologist." 

An Italian proverb, too well known, de- 
clares that, "if you would succeed, you must 
not be too good." It is an advantage, withm 
certain limits, to have renounced the dominion 
of the sentiments of piety, gratitude and gen- 
erosity; since, what was an impassable bar to 
us and still is to others, becomes a convenient 
weapon for our purposes; just as the river 
which was a formidable barrier, winter trans- 
forms into the smoothest of roads 

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments 



200 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

and affections, and would help himself with 
his hands and his head. With him is no mir- 
acle, and no magic. He is a worker in brass, 
in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in build- 
ings, in money, and in troops, and a very con- 
sistent and wise master- workman. He is never 
weak and literary, but acts with the solidity 
and the precision of natural agents. He has 
not lost his native sense and sympathy with 
things. Men give way before such a man as 
before natural events. To be sure, there are 
men enough who are immersed in things, as 
farmers, smiths, sailors, and mechanics gener- 
ally; and we know how real and solid such 
men appear in the presence of scholars and 
grammarians; but these men ordinarily lack 
the power of arrangement, and are like hands 
without a head. But Bonaparte superadded to 
this mineral and animal force, insight and gen- 
eralization, so that men saw in him combined 
the natural and the intellectual power, as if 
the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to 
cipher. Therefore the land and sea seem to 
presuppose him. He came unto his own, and 
they received him. This ciphering operative 
knows what he is working with, and what is 
the product. He knew the properties of gold 
and iron, of wheels and ships, of troops and 
diplomatists, and required that each should do 
after its kind. 

The art of war was the game in which he 
exerted his arithmetic. It consisted, according 
to him, in having always more forces than the 
enemy, on the point where the enemy is at- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 201 

tacked, or where he attacks: and his whole tal- 
ent is strained by endless manoeuvre and evo- 
lution, to march always on the enemy at an 
angle, and destroy his forces in detail. It is 
obivous that a very small force, skilfully and 
rapidly manoeuvring-, so as always to bring two 
men against one at the point of engagement, 
will be an overmatch for a much larger body 
of men. 

The times, his constitution, and his early 
circumstances, combined to develop this pat- 
tern democrat. He had the virtues of his 
class, and the conditions for their activity. 
That common sense, which no sooner respects 
any end, than it finds the means to effect it ; 
the delight in the use of means; in the choice, 
simplification, and combining of means; the 
directness and thoroughness of his work ; the 
prudence with which all was seen, and the en- 
ergy with which all was done, make him the 
natural organ and head of what I may almost 
call, from its extent, the modern party. 

Nature must have far the greatest share in 
every success, and so in his. Such a man was 
wanted, and such a man was born ; a man of 
stone and iron, capable of sitting on horse- 
back sixteen or seventeen hours, of going 
many days together without rest or food, ex- 
cept by snatches, and with the speed and spring 
of a tiger in action ; a man not embarrassed by 
any scruples; compact, instant, selfish, pru- 
dent, and of a perception which did not suffer 
itself to be balked or misled by any pretences 
of others, or any superstition, or any heat or 

14 Representative Men 



202 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

haste of his own. "My hand of iron," he 
said, *'was not at the extremity of my arm; it 
was immediately connected with my head." 
He respected the power of nature and fortune, 
and ascribed to it his superiority, instead of 
valuing himself, like inferior men, on his opin- 
ionativeness and waging war with nature. His 
favorite rhetoric lay in allusion to his star: and 
he pleased himself, as well as the people, when 
he styled himself the "Child of Destiny." 
"They charge me," he said, "with the com- 
mission of great crimes: men of my stamp do 
not commit crimes. Nothing has been more 
simple than my elevation : 'tis in vain to ascribe 
it to intrigue or crime : it was owing to the 
peculiarity of the times, and to my reputation 
of having fought well against the enemies of 
my country. I have always marched with the 
opinion of great masses, and with events. Of 
what use, then, would crimes be to me?" 
Again he said, speaking of his son, "My son 
cannot replace me ; I could not replace myself. 
I am the creature of circumstances." 

He had a directness of action never before 
combined with so much comprehension. He 
is a realist, terrific to all talkers, and confused 
truth-obscuring persons. He sees where the 
matter hinges, throws himself on the precise 
point of resistance, and slights all other con- 
siderations. He is strong in the right manner, 
namely, by insight. He never blundered into 
victory, but won his battles in his head, before 
he won them on the field. His principal means 
are in himself. He asks counsel of no other. 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 203 

In 1796, he writes to the Directory: "I have 
conducted the campaign without consulting any- 
one. I should have done no good, if I had 
been under the necessity of conforming to the 
notions of another person. I have gained some 
advantages over superior forces, and when 
totally destitute of everything, because, in the 
persuasion that your confidence was reposed in 
me, my actions were as prompt as my thoughts. " 
History is full, down to this day, of the im- 
becility of kings and governors. They are a 
class of persons much to be pitied, for they 
know not what they should do. The weavers 
strike for bread ; and the king and his minis- 
ters, not knowing what to do, meet them with 
bayonets. But Napoleon understood his busi- 
ness. Here was a man who, in each moment 
and emergency, knew what to do next. It is an 
immense comfort and refreshment to the 
spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens. Few 
men have any next; they live from hand to 
mouth, without plan, and are ever at the end 
of their line, and, after each action, wait for 
an impulse from abroad. Napoleon had been 
the first man of the world if his ends had been 
purely public. As he is, he inspires confidence 
and vigor by the extraordinary unity of his 
action. He is firm, sure, self-denying, self- 
postponing, sacrificing everything to his aim, 
— money, troops, generals, and his own safety 
also, to his aim ; not misled, like common ad- 
venturers, by the splendor of his own means. 
** Incidents ought not to govern policy," he 
said, *'but policy, incidents." *'To be hurried 



204 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

away by every event, is to have no political sys- 
tem at all. His victories were only so many 
doors, and he never for a moment lost sight of 
his way onward, in the dazzle and uproar of 
the present circumstance. He knew what to 
do, and he flew to his mark. He would shorten 
a straight line to come at his object. Horrible 
anecdotes may, no doubt, be collected from his 
history, of the price at which he bought his 
successes; but he must not therefore be set 
down as cruel ; but only as one who knew no 
impediment to his will ; not bloodthirsty, not 
cruel, — but woe to what thing or person stood 
in his way ! Not bloodthirsty, but not sparing 
of blood, — and pitiless. He saw only the ob- 
ject: the obstacle must give way. "Sire, Gen- 
eral Clarke cannot combine with General Junot, 
for the dreadful fire of the Austrian battery." 
— "Let him carry the battery." — "Sire, every 
regiment that approaches the heavy artillery 
issacrified: Sire, what orders?" — "Forward, 
forward!" Seruzier, a colonel of artillery, 
gives, in his "Military Memoirs," the follow- 
ing sketch of a scene after the battle of Aus- 
terlitz. — "At the moment in which the Russian 
army was making its retreat, painfully, but in 
good order, on the ice of the lake, the Emperor 
Napoleon came riding at full speed toward the 
artillery. 'You are losing time,' he cried; 
*fire upon those masses; they must be en- 
gulfed; fire upon the ice!' The order re- 
mained unexecuted for ten minutes. In vain 
several officers and myself were placed on the 
slope of a hill to produce the effect ; their balls 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 205 

and mine rolled upon the ice, without breaking 
it up. Seeing that, I tried a simple method of 
elevating light howitzers. The almost perpen- 
dicular fall of the heavy projectiles produced 
the desired effect. My method was immedi- 
ately followed by the adjoining batteries, and 
in less than no time we buried" some* "thou- 
sands of Russians and Austrians under the 
waters of the lake. ' ' 

In the plenitude of his resources, every ob- 
stacle seemed to vanish. "There shall be no 
Alps, ' ' he said ; and he built his perfect roads, 
climbing by graded galleries their steepest 
precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris as 
any town in France. He laid his bones to, and 
wrought for his crown. Having decided what 
was to be done, he did that with might and 
main. He put out all his strength. He risked 
everything, and spared nothing, neither am- 
munition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, 
nor himself. 

We like to see everything do its office after 
its kind, whether it be a milch-cow or a rattle- 
snake ; and, if fighting be the best mode of 
adjusting national differences (as large major- 
ities of men seem to agree), certainly Bona- 
parte was right in making it thorough. "The 
grand principle of war," he said, "was, that 
an army ought always to be ready, by day and 
by night, and at all hours, to make all the re- 
sistance it is capable of making. " He never 
economized his ammunition, but, on a hostile 
position, rained a torrent of iron,— shells, balls, 

*As I quote at second-hand, and cannot procure Seruzier, 
I dare not adopt the high figure I find. 



206 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

grape-shot, — to annihilate all defense. On any 
point of resistance, he concentrated squadron 
on squadron in overwhelming numbers, until 
it was swept out of existence. To a regiment 
of horse- chasseurs at Lobenstein, two days be- 
fore the battle of Jena, Napoleon said, "My lads, 
3^ou must not fear death ; when soldiers brave 
death, they drive him into the enemy's ranks. " 
In the fury of assault, he no more spared him- 
self. He went to the edge of his possibility. 
It is plain that in Italy he did what he could, 
and all that he could. He came, several times, 
within an inch of ruin ; and his own person 
was all but lost. He was flung into the marsh 
at Areola. The Austrians were between him 
and his troops, in the melee, and he was 
brought off with desperate efforts. At Lonato, 
and at other places, he was on the point of 
being taken prisoner. He fought sixty bat- 
tles. He had never enough. Each victory 
was a new weapon. *'My power would fall, 
were I not to support it by new achievements. 
Conquest has made me what I am, and con- 
quest must maintain me. " He felt, with every 
wise m.an, that as much life is needed for con- 
servation as for creation. We are always in 
peril, always in a bad plight, just on the edge 
of destruction, and only to be saved by inven- 
tion and courage. 

This vigor was guarded and tehipered by the 
coldest prudence and punctuality. A thunder- 
bolt in the attack, he was found invulnerable 
in his intrenchments. His very attack was 
never the inspiration of courage, but the result 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 207 

of calculation. His idea of the best defense 
consists in being still the attacking party. 
''My ambition," he says, "was great, but was 
of a cold nature. ' ' In one of his conversations 
with Las Casas, he remarked, "As to moral 
courage, I have rarely met with the two- 
o'clock-in-the-morning kind; I mean unpre- 
pared courage, that which, is necessary on an 
unexpected occasion; and which, in spite of 
the most unforeseen events, leaves full free- 
dom of judgment and decision;" and he did 
not hesitate to declare that he was himself 
eminently endowed with this " two-o'clock- in- 
the-morning courage, and that he had met with 
few persons equal to himself in this respect. 

Everything depended on the nicety of his 
combinations, and the stars were not more 
punctual than his arithmetic. His personal 
attention descended to the smallest particulars. 
"At Montebello, I ordered Kellermann to at- 
tack with eight hundred horse, and with these 
he separated the six thousand Hungarian gren- 
adiers, before the very eyes of the Austrian 
cavalry. This cavalry was half a league off, 
and required a quarter of an hour to arrive on 
the field of action; and I have obser\^ed, that 
it is always these quarters of an hour that de- 
cide the fate of a battle." "Before he fought 
a battle, Bonaparte thought little about what 
he should do in case of success, but a great 
deal about what he should do in case of a re- 
verse of fortime. " The same prudence and 
good sense mark all his behavior. His instruc- 
tions to his secretary at the Tuilleries are 



208 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

worth remembering. "During the night, 
enter my chamber as seldom as possible. Do 
not wake me when you have any good news to 
communicate; with that there is no hurry. 
But when you bring bad news, rouse me in- 
stantly, for then there is not a moment to be 
lost. " It was a whimsical economy of the same 
kind which dictated his practice, when general 
in Italy, in regard to his burdensome corres- 
pondence. He directed Bourienne to leave all 
letters unopened for three weeks, and then 
observed with satisfaction how large a part of 
the correspondence had thus disposed of itself, 
and no longer required an answer. His 
achievement of business was immense, and 
enlarges the known powers of man. There 
have been many working kings, from Ulysses 
to William of Orange, but none who accom- 
plished a tithe of this man's performance. 

To these gifts of nature. Napoleon added the 
advantage of having been born to a private 
and humble fortune. In his latter days, he 
had the weakness of wishing to add to his 
crowns and badges the prescription of aristoc- 
racy ; but he knew his debt to his austere edu- 
cation, and made no secret of his contempt for 
the bom kings, and for "the hereditary asses, " 
as he coarsely styled the Bourbons. He said 
that, "in their exile, they had learned nothing, 
and forgot nothing." Bonaparte had passed 
through all the degrees of military service, but 
also was citizen before he was emperor, and so 
had the key to citizenship. His remarks and 
estimates discover the information and justness 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 209 

of measurement of the middle class. Those 
who had to deal with him found that he was 
not to be imposed upon, but could cipher as 
well as another man. This appears in all parts 
of his Memoirs, dictated at St. Helena. When 
the expenses of the empress, of his household, 
of his palaces, had accumulated great debts, 
Napoleon examined the bills of the creditors 
himself, detected overcharges and errors, and 
reduced the claims by considerable sums. 

His grand weapon, namely, the millions 
whom he directed, he owed to the representa- 
tive character which clothed him. He inter- 
ests us as he stands for France and for Europe ; 
and he exists as captain and. king, only as far 
as the Revolution, or the interest of the indus- 
trious masses found an organ and a leader in 
him. In the social interests, he knew the 
meaning and value of labor, and threw himself 
naturally on that side. I like an incident men- 
tioned by one of his biographers at St. Helena. 
''When walking with Mrs. Balcombe, some 
servants, carrying heav}^ boxes, passed by on 
the road, and Mrs. Balcombe desired them, in 
rather an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon 
interfered, saying, 'Respect the burden. Mad- 
am.' " In the time of the empire, he directed 
attention to the improvement and embellish- 
ment of the market of the capital. "The 
market-place," he said, "is the Louvre of the 
common people." The principal works that 
have survived him are his magnificent roads. 
He filled the troops with his spirit, and a sort 
of freedom and companionship grew up be- 



210 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

tween him and them, which the forms of his 
court never permitted between the officers and 
himself. They performed, under his eye, that 
which no others could do. The best document 
of his relation to his troops is the order of the 
day on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, 
in which Napoleon promises the troops that he 
will keep his person out of reach of fire. This 
declaration, which is the reverse of that ordi- 
narily made by generals and sovereigns on the 
eve of a battle, sufficiently explains the devo- 
tion of the army to their leader. 

But though there is in particulars this iden- 
tity between Napoleon and the mass of the 
people, his real strength lay in their convic- 
tion that he was their representative in his 
genius and aims, not only when he courted, 
but when he controlled, and even when he dec- 
imated them by his conscriptions. He knew, 
as well as any Jacobin in France,, how to phil- 
osophize on liberty and equality; and, when 
allusion was made to the precious blood of cen- 
turies, which was spilled by the killing of the 
Due d'Enghien, he suggested, "Neither is my 
blood ditch-water." The people felt that no 
longer the throne was occupied, and the land 
sucked of its nourishment, by a small class of 
legitimates, secluded from all community with 
the children of the soil, and holding the ideas 
and superstitions of a long-forgotten state of 
society. Instead of that vampire, a man of 
themselves held, in the Tuilleries, knowledge 
and ideas like their own, opening, of course, to 
them and their children, all places of power 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 211 

and trust. The day of sleepy, selfish policy, 
ever narrowing the means and opportunities of 
young men, was ended, and a day of expansion 
and demand was come. A market for all the 
powers and productions of man was opened: 
brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes of youth 
and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal 
France was changed into a young Ohio or New 
York ; and those who smarted under the im- 
mediate rigors of the new monarch, pardoned 
them as the necessary severities of the mili- 
tary system which had driven out the oppres- 
sor. And even when the majority of the people 
had begun to ask, whether they had really 
gained anything under the exhausting levies 
of men and money of the new master, — the 
whole talent of the country, in every rank and 
kindred, took his part, and defended him as its 
natural patron. In 1814, when advised to rely 
on the higher classes, Napoleon said to those 
around him, "Gentlemen, in the situation in 
which I stand, my only nobility is the rabble 
of the Faubourgs. ' ' 

Napoleon met this natural expectation. 
The necessity of his position required a hospi- 
tality to every sort of talent, and its appoint- 
ment to trusts; and his feelings went along 
with this policy. Like every superior person, 
he undoubtedly felt a desire for men and com- 
peers, and a wish to measure his power with 
other masters, and an impatience of fools and 
underlings. In Italy, he sought for men, and 
found none. *'Good God!" he said, "how rare 
men are! There are eighteen millions in 



212 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Italy, and I have with difficulty found two, — 
Dandolo and Melzi. " In later years, with 
larger experience, his respect for mankind was 
not increased. In a moment of bitterness, he 
said to one of his oldest friends, "Men de- 
serve the contempt with which they inspire 
me. I have only to put some gold lace on 
the coat of my virtuous republicans, and they 
immediately become just what I wish them." 
This impatience at levity was, however, an 
oblique tribute of respect to those able per- 
sons who commanded his regard, not only 
when he found them friends and coadjutors, 
but also when they resisted his will. He could 
not confound Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette, 
and Bernadotte, with the danglers of his court; 
and, in spite of the detraction which his syste- 
matic egotism dictated toward the great cap- 
tains who conquered with and for him, ample 
acknowledgements are made by him to Lannes 
Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, Massena, Murat, Ney, 
and Augereau. If he felt himself their patron, 
and founder of their fortunes, as when he said, 
"I made my generals out of mud," he could 
not hide his satisfaction in receiving from 
them a seconding and support commensurate 
with the grandeur of his enterprise. In the 
Russian campaign, he was so much impressed 
by the courage and resources of Marshal Ney, 
that he said, "I have two hundred millions in 
my coffers, and I would give them all for 
Ney. " The characters which he has drawn of 
several of his marshals are discriminating, and, 
though they did not content the insatiable van- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 213 

ity of French officers, are, no doubt, substan- 
tially just. And, in fact, every species of 
merit was sought and advanced under his gov- 
ernment. "I know," he said, "the depth and 
draught of water of every one of my generals. " 
Natural power was sure to be well received at 
his court. Seventeen men, in his time, were 
raised from common soldiers to the rank of 
king, marshal, duke, or general; and the 
crosses of his Legion of Honor were given to 
personal valor, and not to family connection. 
"When soldiers have been baptized in the fire 
of a battle-field, they have all one rank in my 
eyes." 

When a natural king becomes a titular king, 
ever}^body is pleased and satisfied. The Revo- 
lution entitled the strong populace of the 
Faubourg St. Antoine, and every horse-boy 
and powder-monkey in the army, to look on 
Napoleon as flesh of his flesh, and the creature 
of his party: but there is something in the suc- 
cess of grand talent which enlists an universal 
sympathy. For, in the prevalence of sense 
and spirit over stupidity and malversation, all 
reasonable men have an interest; and, as intel- 
lectual beings, we feel the air purified by the 
electric shock, when material force is over- 
thrown by intellectual energies. As soon as 
we are removed out of the reach of local and 
accidental partialities, man feels that Napo- 
leon fights for him ; these are honest victories ; 
this strong ' steam-engine does our work. 
Whatever appeals to the imagination, by tran- 
scending the ordinary limits of human ability, 



214 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

wonderfully encourages and liberates us. This 
capacious head, revolving and disposing sov- 
ereignly trains of affairs, and animating such 
multitudes of agents; this eye, which looked 
through Europe; this prompt invention; this 
inexhaustible resource; — what events! what 
romantic pictures! what strange situations! — 
when spying the Alps, by a sunset in the 
Sicilian sea; drawing up his army for battle, 
in sight of the Pyramids, and saying to his 
troops, "From the tops of those pyramids, 
forty centuries look down on you;" fording the 
Red Sea; wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of 
Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais, gigantic 
projects agitated him. "Had Acre fallen, I 
should have changed the face of the world. " 
His army, on the night of the battle of Auster- 
litz, which was the anniversary of his inaugura- 
tion as Emperor, presented him with a bouquet 
of forty standards taken in the fight. Perhaps 
it is a little puerile, the pleasure he took in 
making these contrasts glaring; as when he 
pleased himself with making kings wait in his 
antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris, and at 
Erfurt. 

^ We cannot, in the universal imbecility, inde- 
cision, and indolence of men, sufficiently con- 
gratulate ourselves on this strong and ready 
actor, who took occasion by the beard, and 
showed us how much may be accomplished by 
the mere force of such virtues as all men possess 
in less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by 
personal attention, by courage, and thorough- 
ness. "The Austrians," he said, "do not 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 215 

know the value of time. ' ' I should cite him, 
in his earlier years, as a model of prudence. 
His power does not consist in any wild or ex- 
travagant force ; in any enthusiasm, like Maho- 
met's; or singular power of persuasion; but 
in the exercise of common sense on each emer- 
gency, instead of abiding by rules and customs. 
The lesson he teaches is that which vigor 
always teaches, — that there is always room for 
it. To what heaps of cowardly doubts is not 
that man's life an answer. When he appeared, 
it was the belief of all military men that there 
could be nothing new in w^ar ; as it is the belief 
of men to-day, that nothing new can be un- 
dertaken in politics, or in church, or in letters, 
or in trade, or in farming, or in our social 
manners and customs; and as it is, at all times, 
the belief of society that the world is used up. 
But Bonaparte knew better than society; and, 
moreover, knew that he knew better. I think 
all men know better than they do; know that 
the institutions we so volubly commend are go- 
carts and baubles; but they dare not trust 
their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on his 
own sense, and did not care a bean for other 
people's. The world treated his novelties just 
as it treats everybody's novelties, — made infi- 
nite objection: mustered all the impediments; 
but he snapped his finger at their objections. 
"What creates great difficulty," he remarks, 
"in the profession of the land commander, is 
the necessity of feeding- so many men and 
animals. If he allows himself to be guided by 
the commissaries, he will never stir, and all his 



216 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

expeditions will fail." An example of his 
common sense is what he says of the passage 
of the Alps in winter, which all writers, one 
repeating after the other, had described as im- 
practicable. ''The winter," says Napoleon, 
"is not the most unfavorable season for the 
passage of lofty mountains. The snow is then 
firm, the weather settled, and there is nothing 
to fear from avalanches, the real and only dan- 
ger to be apprehended in the Alps. On those 
high mountains, there are often very fine days 
in December, of a dry cold, with extreme calm- 
ness in the air. " Read his accoimt, too, of 
the way in which battles are gained. "In all 
battles, a moment occurs, when the bravest 
troops, after having made the greatest efforts, 
feel inclined to run. That teiTor proceeds 
from a want of confidence in their own cour- 
age; and it only requires a slight opportunity, 
a pretense, to restore confidence to them. 
The art is to give rise to the opportunity, and 
to invent the pretense. At Areola, I won the 
battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized 
that moment of lassitude, gave every man a 
trumpet, and gained the day with this handful. 
You see that two armies are two bodies which 
meet, and endeavor to frighten each other: a 
moment of panic occurs, and that moment 
must be turned to advantage. When a man 
has been present in many actions, he distin- 
guishes that moment without difficulty; it is 
as easy as casting up an addition." 

This deputy of the nineteenth century added 
to his gifts a capacity for speculation on gen- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 217 

eral topics. He delighted in running- through 
the range of practical, of literary, and of ab- 
stract questions. His opinion is always origi- 
nal, and to the purpose. On the voyage to 
Egypt, he liked, after dinner, to fix on three 
or four persons to support a proposition, and 
as many to oppose it. He gave a subject, and 
the discussions turned on questions of religion, 
the different kinds of government, and the art 
of war. One day, he asked, whether the 
planets were inhabited? On another, what 
was the age of the world? Then he proposed 
to consider the probability of the destruction 
of the globe, either by water or by fire; at 
another time, the truth or fallacy of presenti- 
ments, and the interpretation of dreams. He 
was very fond of talking of religion. In 1806, 
he conversed with Fournier, bishop of Mont- 
pelier, on matters of theology. There were 
two points on which they could not agree, viz. , 
that of hell, and that of salvation out of the 
pale of the church. The Emperor told Jose- 
phine, that he disputed like a devil on these 
two points, on which the bishop was inexor- 
able. To the philosophers he readily yielded 
all that was proved against religion as the work 
of men and time; but he would not hear of 
materialism. One fine night, on deck, amid 
a clatter of materialism, Bonaparte pointed to 
the stars, and said, "You may talk as long as 
you please, gentlemen, but who made all that?" 
He delighted in the conversation of men of 
science, particularly of Monge and Berthollet ; 
but the men of letters he slighted; "they were 



218 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

manufacturers of phrases. " Of medicine, too, 
he was fond of talking, and with those of its 
practitioners whom he most esteemed, — with 
Corvisart at Paris, and with Antonomarchi at 
St. Helena. "Believe me," he said to the 
last, "we had better leave off all these reme- 
dies: life is a fortress which neither you nor I 
know anything about. Why throw obstacles 
in the way of its defense? Its own means are 
superior to all the apparatus of your laborato- 
ries. Corvisart candidly agreed with me, that 
all your filthy mixtures are good for nothing. 
Medicine is a collection of uncertain prescrip- 
tions, the results of which, taken collectively, 
are more fatal than useful to mankind. Water, 
air, and cleanliness, are the chief articles in my 
pharmacopeia." 

His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon 
and General Gourgaud, at St. Helena, have 
great value, after all the deduction that, it 
seems, is to be made from them, on account of 
his known disingenuousness. He has the good- 
nature of strength and conscious superiority. 
I admire his simple, clear narrative of his bat- 
tles; — good as Caesar's; his good-natured and 
sufficiently respectful account of Marshal 
Wurmser and his other antagonists, and his 
own equality as a writer to his varying sub- 
ject. The most agreeable portion is the Cam- 
paign in Egypt. 

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In 
intervals of leisure, either in the camp or the 
palace, Napoleon appears as a man of genius, 
directing on abstract questions the native 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 219 

appetite for truth, and the impatience of words, 
he was wont to show in war. He could enjoy 
every play of invention, a romance, a bo7i mot, 
as well as a stratagem in a campaig^n. He de- 
lighted to fascinate Josephine and her ladies, 
in a dim-lighted apartment, by the terrors of a 
fiction, to which his voice and dramatic power 
lent every addition. 

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the 
middle class of modern society; of the throng 
who fill the markets, shops, counting-houses, 
manufactories, ships, of the modern w^orld, 
aiming to be rich. He was the agitator, the 
destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, 
the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, 
the opener of doors and markets, the subverter 
of monopoly and abuse. Of course, the rich 
and aristocratic did not like him. England, 
the center of capital, and Rome and Austria, 
centers of tradition and genealogy, opposed 
him. The consternation of the dull and con- 
servative classes, the terror of the foolish old 
men and old women of the Roman conclave, — 
who in their despair took hold of anything, and 
would cling to red-hot iron, — the vain attempts 
of statists to amuse and deceive him, of the 
emperor of Austria to bribe him ; and the in- 
stinct of the young, ardent, and active men, 
everywhere, which pointed him out as the 
giant of the middle class, make his history 
bright and commanding. He had the virtues 
of the masses*of his constituents; he had also 
their vices. I am sorry that the brilliant pic- 
ture has its reverse. But that is the fatal qual- 



220 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

ity which we discover in our pursuit of wealth, 
that it is treacherous, and is bought by the 
breaking or weakening of the sentiments ; and 
it is inevitable that we should find the same 
fact in the history of this champion, who pro- 
posed to himself simply a brilliant career, with- 
out any stipulation or scruple concerning the 
means. 

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of gener- 
ous sentiments. The highest-placed individ- 
ual in the most cultivated age and population 
of the world, — he has not the merit of common 
truth and honesty. He is unjust to his gener- 
als; egotistic, and monopolizing; meanly steal- 
ing the credit of their great actions from Kel- 
lermann, from Bernadotte; intriguing to 
involve his faithful Junot in hopeless bank- 
ruptcy, in order to drive him to a distance from 
Paris, because the familiarity of his manners 
offends the new pride of his throne. He is a 
boundless liar. The official paper, his "Mon- 
iteurs," and all his bulletins, are proverbs for 
saying what he wished to be believed; and 
w^orse, — he sat, in his premature old age, in his 
lonely island, coldly falsifying facts, and dates, 
and characters, and giving to history, a theat- 
rical eclat. Like all Frenchmen, he has a pas- 
sion for stage effect. Every action that breathes 
of generosity is poisoned by this calculation. 
His star, his love of glory, his doctrine of the 
immortality of the soul, are all French. "I 
must dazzle and astonish. If I were to give 
the liberty of the press, my power could not 
last three days." To make a great noise is his 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 221 

favorite design. "A great reputation is a great 
noise ; the more there is made, the farther off 
it is heard. Laws, institutions, monuments, 
nations, all fall; but the noise continues, and 
resounds in after ages." His doctrine of im- 
mortality is simply fame. His theory of influ- 
ence is not flattering. "There are two levers 
for moving men, — interest and fear. Love is 
a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friend- 
ship is but a name. I love nobody. I do not 
even love my brothers; perhaps Joseph, a lit- 
tle, from habit, and because he is my elder; 
and Duroc, I love him too; but why? — because 
his character pleases me ; he is stern and reso- 
lute, and, I believe, the feHow never shed a 
tear. For my part, I know very well that I 
have no true friends. As long as I continue 
to be what I am, I may have as many pre- 
tended friends as I please. Leave sensibility 
to women ; but men should be firm in heart 
and purpose, or they should have nothing to 
do with war and government." He was thor- 
oughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, 
assassinate, drown, and poison, as his interest 
dictated. He had no generosity; but mere 
vulgar hatred; he was intensely selfish; he 
was perfidious ; he cheated at cards ; he was a 
prodigious gossip; and opened letters; and 
delighted in his infamous police ; and rubbed 
his hands with joy when he had intercepted 
some morsel of intelligence concerning the men 
and women about him, boasting that "he knew 
everything;" and interfered with the cutting 
the dresses of the women ; and listened after 



222 --REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

the hurrahs and the compliments of the street, 
incognito. His manners were coarse. He 
treated women with low familiarity. He had 
the habit of pulling- their ears and pinching 
their cheeks, when he was in good humor, and 
of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of 
striking and horse-play with them, to his last 
days. It does not appear that he listened at 
keyholes, or, at least, that he was caught at it. 
In short, when you have penetrated through 
all the circles of power and splendor, you were 
not dealing with a gentleman, at last; but with 
an impostor and a rogue; and he fully deserves 
the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of 
Scamp Jupiter. 

In describing the two parties into which 
modern society divides itself, — the democrat 
and the conservative, — I said, Bonaparte rep- 
resents the democrat, or the party of men of 
business, against the stationary or conservative 
party. I omitted then to say, what is material 
to the statement, namely, that these two par- 
ties differ only as young and old. The demo- 
crat is a young conservative ; the conservative 
is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the 
democrat ripe, and gone to seed, — because 
both parties stand on the one ground of the 
supreme value of property, which one endeav- 
ors to get, and the other to keep. Bonaparte 
may be said to represent the whole history of 
this party, its youth and its age ; yes, and with 
poetic justice, its fate, in his own. The 
counter-revolution, the counter-party, still 
waits for its organ and representative, in a 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 223 

lover and a man of truly public and universal 
aims. 

Here was an experiment, under the most 
favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect 
without conscience. Never was such a leader 
so endowed, and so weaponed; never leader 
found such aids and followers. And what was 
the result of this vast talent and power, of these 
immense armies, burned cities, squandered 
treasures, immolated millions of men, of this 
demoralized Europe? It came to no result. 
All passed away, like the smoke of his artillery 
and left no trace. He left France smaller, 
poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the 
whole contest for freedom was to be beg^un 
again. The attempt was, in principle, suicidal. 
France served him with life, and limb, and es- 
tate, as long as it could identify its interest 
with him ; but when men saw that after victory 
was another war; after the destruction of 
armies, new conscriptions ; and they who had 
toiled so desperately were never nearer to the 
reward, — they could not spend what they had 
earned, nor repose on their down-beds, nor 
strut in their chateaux, — they deserted him. 
Men found that his absorbing egotism was 
deadly to all other men. It resembled the tor- 
pedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks on 
any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms 
which contract the muscles of the hand, so that 
the man cannot open his fingers; and the ani- 
mal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until 
he paralyzes and kills his victim. So, this 
exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and 



224 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

absorbed the power and existence of those who 
served him ; and the universal cry of France, 
and of Europe, in 1814, was, "enough of 
him;" "assez de Bonaparte." 

It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all 
that in him lay, to live and thrive without 
moral principle. It was the nature of things, 
the eternal law of man and of the world, which 
baulked and ruined him ; and the result, in a 
million experiments, will be the same. Every 
experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, 
that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail. 
The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the 
pernicious Napoleon. As long as our civiliza- 
tion is essentially one of property, of fences, of 
exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. 
Our riches will leave us sick; there will be 
bitterness in our laughter ; and our wine will 
burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which 
we can taste with all doors open, and which 
serves all men. 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER 



225 
15 Representative Men 



VII. 

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 



I find a provision in the constitution of the 
world for the writer or secretary, who is to 
report the doings of the miraculous spirit of 
life that everywhere throbs and works. His 
office is a reception of the facts into the mind, 
and then a selection of the eminent and char- 
acteristic experiences. 

Nature will be reported. All things are en- 
gaged in writing their history. The planet, 
the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The 
rolling rock leaves its scratches on the moun- 
tain; the river, its channel in the soil; the ani- 
mal, its bones in the stratum ; the fern and 
leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The 
falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or 
the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow, or 
along the ground, but prints in characters more 
or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act 
of the man "inscribes itself in the memories of 
his fellows, and in his own manners and face. 
The air is full of sounds ; the sky, of tokens ; 
the ground is all memoranda and signatures; 
and every object covered over with hints, 
which speak to the intelligent. 



228 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

In nature, this self-registration is incessant, 
and the narrative is the print of the seal. It 
neither exceeds nor comes short of the fact. 
But nature strives upward; and, in man, the 
report is something more than print of the 
seal. It is a new and finer form of the origi- 
nal. The record is alive, as that which it re- 
corded is alive. In man, the memory is a kind 
of looking-glass, which, having received the 
images of surrounding objects, is touched with 
life, and disposes them in a new order. The 
facts which transpired do not lie in it inert ; 
but some subside, and others shine; so that 
soon we have a new picture, composed of the 
eminent experiences. The man cooperates. 
He loves to communicate; and that which is 
for him to say lies as a load on his heart until 
it is delivered. But, besides the universal joy 
of conversation, some men are born with ex- 
alted powers for this second creation. Men are 
born to write. The gardener saves every slip, 
and seed, and peach-stone; his vocation is to 
be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer 
attend his affairs. Whatever he beholds or ex- 
periences, comes to him as a model, and sits 
for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that 
they say, that some things are undescribable. 
He believes that all that can be thought can be 
\vritten, first or last; and he would report the 
Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so broad, 
so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore com- 
mended to his pen, — and he will write. In his 
eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the 
universe is the possibility of being reported. 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 229 

In conversation, in calamity, he finds^ new 
materials; as our German poet said, "some 
god gave me the power to paint what I suffer. " 
He draws his rents from rage and pain. By- 
acting rashly, he buys the power of talking 
wisely. Vexations, and a tempest of passion, 
only fill his sails; as the good Luther writes, 
"When I am angry I can pray well, and preach 
well;" and if we knew the genesis of fine- 
strokes of eloquence, they might recall the 
complaisance of Sultan Amurath. who struck 
off some Persian heads, that his physician, 
Vesalius, might see the spasms in the muscles 
of the neck. His failures are the preparation 
of his victories. A new thought, or a crisis of 
passion, apprises him that all that he has yet 
learned and written is exoteric— is not the 
fact, but some rumor of the fact. What then? 
Does he throw away the pen? No; he begins 
again to describe in the new light which has 
shined on him,— if, by some means, he may 
yet save some true word. Nature conspires. 
Whatever can be thought can be spoken, and 
still rises for utterance, though to rude and 
stammering organs. If they cannot compass 
it, it waits and works, until, at last, it moulds 
them to its perfect will, and is articulated. 

This striving after imitative expression, 
which one meets everywhere, is significant of 
the aim of nature, but is mere stenography. 
There are higher degrees, and nature has 
more splendid endowments for those whom 
she elects to a superior office; for the class of 
scholars or writers, who see connection where 



230 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

the multitude see fragments, and who are im- 
pelled to exhibit the facts in order, and so to 
supply the axis on which the frame of thino^s 
turns. Nature has dearly at heart the forma- 
tion of the speculative man, or scholar. It is 
an end never lost sight of, and is prepared in 
the original casting of things. He is no per- 
missive or accidental appearance, but an or- 
ganic agent, one of the estates of the realm, 
provided and prepared from of old and from 
everlasting, in the knitting and contexture of 
things. Presentiments, impulses, cheer him. 
There is a certain heat in the breast, which 
attends the perception of a primary truth, 
which is the shining of the spiritual sun down 
into the shaft of the mine. Every thought 
which dawns on the mind, in the moment of its 
emergency announces its own rank, — whether 
it is some whimsy, or whether it is a power. 

If he have his incitements, there is, on the 
other side, invitation and need enough of his 
gift. vSociety has, at all times, the same want, 
namely, of one sane man with adequate pow- 
ers of expression to hold up each object of 
monomania in its right relation. The ambi- 
tious and mercenary bring their last new mum- 
bo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas, railroad, 
Romanism, mesmerism, or California; and, by 
detaching the object from its relations, easily 
succeed in making it seen in a glare ; and a 
multitude go mad about it, and they are not 
to be reproved or cured by the opposite multi- 
tude, who are kept from this particular insan- 
ity by an equal frenzy on another crochet. But 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 231 

let one man have the comprehensive eye that 
can replace this isolated prodigy in its right 
neighborhood and bearings, — the illusion van« 
ishes, and the returning reason of the commu- 
nity thanks the reason of the monitor. 

The scholar is the man of the ages, but he 
must also wish, with other men, to stand well 
with his contemporaries. But there is a cer- 
tain ridicule, among superficial people, thrown 
on the scholars or clerisy, which is of no im- 
port, unless the scholars heed it. In this 
country, the emphasis of conversation, and of 
public opinion, commends the practical man ; 
and the solid portion of the community is 
named with significant respect in every circle. 
Our people are of Bonaparte's opinion concern- 
ing ideologists. Ideas are subversive of social 
order and comfort, and at last make a fool of 
the possessor. It is believed, the ordering a 
cargo of goods from New York to Smyrna; or, 
the running up and down to procure a com- 
pany of subscribers to set a-going five or ten 
thousand spindles; or, the negotiations of a 
caucus, and the practising on the prejudices 
and facility of country-people, to secure their 
votes in November, — is practical and com- 
mendable. 

If I were to compare action of a much higher 
strain with a life of contemplation, I should 
not venture to pronounce with much confidence 
in favor of the former. Mankind have such a 
deep stake in inward illumination, that there 
is much to be said by the hermit or monk in 
defense of his life of thought and prayer. A 



232 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

certain partiality, a headiness, and loss of bal- 
ance, is the tax which all action must pay. 
Act, if you like, — but you do it at your peril. 
Men's actions are too strong for them. Show 
me a man who has acted, and who has not 
been the victim and slave of his action. What 
they have done commits and enforces them to 
do the same again. The first act, which was 
to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. 
The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in 
some rite or covenant, and he and his friends 
cleave to the form and lose the aspiration. 
The Quaker has established Quakerism, the 
Shaker has established his monastery and his 
dance; and, although each prates of spirit, 
there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti- 
spiritual. But where are his new things of to- 
day? In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback 
appears: but in those lower activities, which 
have no higher aim than to make us more com- 
fortable and more cowardly, in actions of cun- 
ning, actions that steal and lie, actions that 
divorce the speculative from the practical fac- 
ulty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, 
there is nothing else but drawback and nega- 
tion. The Hindoos write in their sacred books, 
** Children only, and not the learned, speak of the 
speculative and the practical faculties as two. 
They are but one, for both obtain the selfsame 
end, and the place which is gained by the fol- 
lowers of the one is gained by the followers 
of the other. That man seeth, who seeth that 
the speculative and the practical doctrines are 
one. ' ' For great action must draw on the 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 233 

spiritual nature. The measure of action is the 
sentiment from which it proceeds. The great- 
est action may easily be one of the most private 
circumstances. 

This disparagement will not come from the 
leaders, but from inferior persons. The robust 
gentlemen who stand at the head of the prac- 
tical class, share the ideas of the time, and' 
have too much sympathy with the speculative 
class. It is not from men excellent in any 
kind, that disparagement of any other is to be 
looked for. With such, Talleyrand's question 
is ever the main one; not, is he rich? is he 
committed? is he well-meaning? has he this or 
that faculty? is he of the movement? is he of 
the establishment? — but, Is he anybody? does 
he stand for something? He must be good of 
his kind. That is all that Talleyrand, all that 
State-street, all that the common sense of 
mankind asks. Be real and admirable, not as 
we know, but as you know. Able men do not 
care in what kind a man is able, so only that 
he is able. A master likes a master, and does 
not stipulate whether it be orator, artist, 
craftsman, or king. 

Society has really no graver interest than the 
well-being of the literary class. And it is not 
to be denied that men are cordial in their recog- 
nition and welcome of intellectual accomplish- 
ments. Still the writer does not stand with us 
on any commanding ground. I think this to 
be his own fault. A pound passes for a pound. 
There have been times when he was a sacred 
person ; he wrote Bibles ; the first hymns ; the 



234 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

codes ; the epics ; tragic songs ; Sibylline verses ; 
Chaldean oracles j Laconian sentences in- 
scribed on temple walls. Every word was true, 
and woke the nations to new life. He wrote 
without levity, and without choice. Every 
word was carved, before his eyes, into the earth 
and sky ; and the sun and stars were only let- 
ters of the same purport ; and of no more ne- 
cessity. But how can he be honored, when he 
does not honor himself; when he loses himself 
in the crowd; when he is no longer the law- 
giver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy 
opinion of a reckless public; when he must 
sustain with shameless advocacy some bad 
government, or must bark, all the year round, 
in opposition; or write conventional criticism, 
or profligate novels; or, at any rate, write 
without thought, and without recurrence, by 
day and night, to the sources of inspiration? 

Some reply to these questions may be fur- 
nished by looking over the list of men of liter- 
ary genius in our age. Among these, no more 
instructive name occurs than that of Goethe, 
to represent the power and duties of the scholar 
or writer. 

I described Bonaparte as a representative of 
the popular external life and aims of the nine- 
teenth century. Its other half, its poet, is 
Goethe, a man quite domesticated in the cen- 
tury, breathing its air, enjoying its fruits, im- 
possible at any earlier time, and taking away, 
by his colossal parts, the reproach of weak- 
ness, which, but for him, would lie on the 
intellectual works of the period. He appears 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 235 

at a time when a general culture has spread 
itself, and has smoothed down all sharp indi- 
vidual traits; when, in the absence of heroic 
characters, a social comfort and cooperation 
have come in. There is no poet, but scores 
of poetic writers ; no Columbus, but hundreds 
of post-captains, with transit-telescope, bar- 
ometer, and concentrated soup and pemmican ; 
no Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any number 
of clever parliamentary and forensic debaters ; 
no prophet or saint, but colleges of divinity ; 
no learned man, but learned societies, a cheap 
press, reading-rooms, and book-clubs, without 
number. There was never such a miscellany 
of facts. The world extends itself like Ameri- 
can trade. We conceive Greek or Roman life, 
— ^life in the middle ages — to be a simple and 
comprehensive affair ; but modern life to re- 
spect a multitude of things, which is distract- 
ing. 

Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplic- 
ity; hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and 
bappy to cope with this rolling miscellany of 
facts and sciences, and, by his own versatility, 
to dispose of them with ease ; a manly mind, 
unembarrassed by the variety of coats of con- 
vention with which life had got encrusted, 
easily able by his subtlety to pierce these, and 
to draw his strength from nature, with which 
he lived in full communion. What is strange, 
too, he lived in a small town, in a petty state, 
in a defeated state, and in a time when Ger- 
many played no such leading part in the 
world's affairs as to swell the bosom of her sons 



236 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

with any metropolitan pride, such as might 
have cheered a French, or English, or, once, a 
Roman or Attic genius. Yet there is no trace 
of provincial limitation in his muse. He is 
not a debtor to his position, but was bom with 
a free and controlling genius. 

The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is 
a philosophy of literature set in poetry; the 
v/ork of one who found himself the master of 
histories, mythologies, philosophies, sciences, 
and national literatures, in the encyclopsedical 
manner in which modern erudition, with its 
international intercourse of the whole earth's 
population, researches into Indian, Etruscan, 
and all Cyclopaean arts, geology, chemistry, 
astronomy ; and every one of these kingdoms 
assuming a certain aerial and poetic character, 
by reason of the multitude. One looks at a 
king with reverence ; but if one should chance 
to be at a congress of kings, the eye would 
take liberties with the peculiarities of each. 
These are not wild miraculous songs, but elabo- 
rate forms, to which the poet has confided the 
results of eighty years of observation. This 
reflective and critical wisdom makes the poem 
more truly the flower of this time. It dates 
itself. Still he is a poet, — poet of a prouder 
laurel than any contemporary, and under this 
plague of microscopes (for he seems to see out 
of every pore of his skin), strikes the harp 
with a hero's strength and grace. 

The wonder of the book is its superior intel- 
ligence. In the menstruum of this man's wit, 
the past and the present ages, and their relig- 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 237 

ions, politics, and modes of thinking, are dis- 
solved into archetypes and ideas. What new 
mythologies sail through his head ! The Greeks 
said, that Alexander went as far as Chaos; 
Goethe went, only the other day, as far; and 
one step farther he hazarded, and brought him- 
self safe back. 

There is a heart-cheering freedom in his 
speculation. The immense horizon which 
journeys with us lends its majesties to trifles, 
and to matters of convenience and necessity, 
as to solemn and festal performances. He was 
the soul of his century. If that v/as learned, 
and had become, by population, compact 
organization, and drill of parts, one great Ex- 
ploring Expedition, accumulating a glut of 
facts and fruits too fast for any hitherto-exist- 
ing savants to classify, this man's mind had 
ample chambers for the distribution of all. He 
had a power to unite the detached atoms again 
by their own law. He has clothed our mod- 
em existence with poetry. Amid littleness 
and detail, he detected the Genius of life, the 
old cunning Proteus, nestling close beside us, 
and showed that the dullness and prose we 
ascribe to the age was only another of his 
masks : — 

"His very flight is presence in disguise:" 

that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue 
dress, and was not a whit less vivacious or rich 
in Liverpool or the Hague, than once in Rome 
or Antioch. He sought him in public squares 
and main streets, in boulevards and hotels; 



238 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

and, in the solidest kingdom of routine and 
the senses, he showed the lurking daemonic 
power; that, in actions of routine, a thread of 
mythology and fable spins itself ; and this, by- 
tracing the pedigree of every usage and prac- 
tice, every institution, utensil, and means, 
home to its origin in the structure of man. He 
had an extreme impatience of conjecture and 
of rhetoric. "I have guesses enough of my 
own ; if a man write a book, let him set down 
only what he knows." He writes in the plain- 
est and lowest tone, omitting a great deal more 
than he writes, and putting ever a thing for a 
word. He has explained the distinction be- 
tween the antique and the modern spirit and 
art. He has defined art, its scope and laws. 
He has said the best things about nature that 
ever were said. He treats nature as the old 
philosophers, as the seven wise masters did, — 
and, with v/hatever loss of French tabulation 
and dissection, poetry and humanity remain to 
us; and they have some doctorial skill. Eyes 
are better, on the whole, than telescopes or 
microscopes. He has contributed a key to 
many parts of nature, through the rare turn 
for unity and simplicity in his mind. Thus 
Goethe suggested the leading idea of modem 
botany, that a leaf, or the eye of a leaf, is 
the unit of botany, and that every part of the 
plant is only a transformed leaf to meet a new- 
condition; and, by varying the conditions, a 
leaf may be converted into any other organ, 
and any other organ into a leaf. In like man- 
ner, in osteology, he assumed that one vertebra 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 239 

of the spine might be considered the unit of 
the skeleton ; the head was only the upper- 
most vertebra transformed. "The plant goes 
from knot to knot, closing, at last, with the 
flower and the seed. So the tape- worm, the 
caterpillar, goes from knot to knot, and closes 
with the head. Men and the higher animals 
are built up through the vertebrae, the powers 
being concentrated in the head. ' ' In optics, 
again, he rejected the artificial theory of seven 
colors, and considered that every color was the 
mixture of light and darkness in new propor- 
tions. It is really of very little consequence 
what topic he writes upon. He sees at every 
pore, and has a certain gravitation toward 
truth. He will realize what you say. He 
hates to be trifled with, and to be made to say 
over again some old wife's fable, that has had 
possession of men's faith these thousand years. 
He may as well see if it is true as another. 
He sifts it. I am here, he would say, to be 
the measure and judge of these things. Why 
should I take them on trust? And, therefore, 
what he says of religion, of passion, of mar- 
riage, of manners, property, of paper money, 
of periods or beliefs, of omens, of luck, or what- 
ever else, refuses to be forgotten. 

Take the most remarkable example that 
could occur of this tendency to verify every 
term in popular use. The Devil had played 
an important part in mythology in all times. 
Goethe would Itave no word that does not cover 
a thing. The same measure will still serve : 
*'I have never heard of any crime which I 



240 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

might not have committed. " So he flies at 
the throat of this imp. He shall be real; he 
shall be modern; he shall be European; he 
shall dress like a gentleman, and accept the 
manner, and walk in the streets, and be well 
initiated in the life of Vienna, and of Heidel- 
berg, in 1820, — or he shall not exist. Accord- 
ingly, he stripped him of mythologic gear, of 
horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail, brimstone, 
and blue-fire, and, instead of looking in books 
and pictures, looked for him in his own mind, 
in every shade of coldness, selfishness, and 
unbelief that, in crowds, or in solitude, darkens 
over the human thought, — and found that the 
portrait gained reality and terror by every- 
thing he added, and by everything he took away. 
He found that the essence of this hobgoblin, 
which had hovered in shadow about the habi- 
tations of men, ever since they were men, was 
pure intellect, applied, — as always there is a 
tendency, — to the service of the senses: and 
he flung into literature, in his Mephistopheles, 
the first organic figure that has been added for 
some ages, and which will remain as long as 
the Prometheus. 

I have no design to enter into any analysis 
of his numerous works. They consist of trans- 
lations, criticisms, dramas, lyric and every 
other description of poems, literary journals, 
and portraits of distinguished men. Yet I can- 
not omit to specify the Wilhelm Meister. 

Wilhelm Meister is a novel in every sense, 
the first of its kind, called by its admirers the 
only delineation of modern society, — as if 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 241 

Other novels, those of Scott, for example, dealt 
with costume and condition, this with the spirit 
of life. It is a book over which some veil is 
still drawn. It is read by very intelligent per- 
sons with wonder and delight. It is preferred 
by some such to Hamlet, as a work of genius. 
I suppose no book of this century can compare 
with it in its delicious sweetness, so new, so 
provoking to the mind, gratifying it with so 
many and so solid thoughts, just insights into 
life, and manners, and characters; so many 
good hints for the conduct of life, so many un- 
expected glimpses into a higher sphere, and 
never a trace of rhetoric or dullness. A very 
provoking book to the curiosity of young men 
of genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. 
Lovers of light reading, those who look in it 
for the entertainment they find in a romance, 
are disappointed. On the other hand, those 
who begin it with the higher hope to read in 
it a worthy history of genius, and the just award 
of the laurels to its toils and denials, have also 
reason to complain. We had an English ro- 
mance here, not long ago, professing to em- 
body the hope of a new age, and to unfold the 
political hope of the party called "Young Eng- 
land," in which the only reward of virtue is a 
seat in parliament, and a peerage. Goethe's 
romance has a conclusion as lame and immoral. 
George Sand, in Consuelo and its continuation, 
has sketched a truer and more dignified pict- 
ure. In the progress of the story, the charac- 
ters of the hero and heroine expand at a rate 
that shivers the porcelain chess-table of aristo- 

16 Representative Men 



242 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

cratic convention: they quit the societ}' and 
habits of their rank; they lose their wealth; 
they become the servants of great ideas, and 
of the most generous social ends ; until, at last, 
the hero, who is the center and fountain of an 
association for the rendering of the noblest 
benefits to the human race, no longer answers 
to his own titled name : it sounds foreign and 
remote in his ear. 

''I am only man," he says; *'I breathe and 
work for man," and this in poverty and ex- 
treme sacrifices. Goethe's hero, on the con- 
trary, has so many weaknesses and impurities, 
and keeps such bad company, that the sober 
English public, when the book was translated, 
were disgusted. And yet it is so crammed 
with wisdom, with knowledge of the world, 
and with knowledge of laws; the persons so 
truly and subtly drawn, and with such few 
strokes, and not a word too much, the book 
remains ever so new and unexhausted, that v/e 
must even let it go its way, and be willing to 
get what good from it we can, assured that it 
has only begun its office, and has millions of 
readers yet to serve. 

The argument is the passage of a democrat 
to the aristocracy, using both words in their 
best sense. And this passage is not made in 
any mean or creeping way, but through the 
hall door. Nature and character assist, and 
the rank is made real by sense and probity in 
the nobles. No generous youth can escape 
this charm of reality in the book, so that it is 
highly stimulating to intellect and courage. 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 243 

The ardent and holy Novalis characterized 
the book as "thoroughly modern and prosaic; 
the romantic is completely leveled in it ; so is 
the poetry of nature; the wonderful. The 
book treats only of the ordinary affairs of men : 
it is a poeticized civic and domestic story. 
The wonderful in it is expressly treated as 
fiction and enthusiastic dreaming:" — and yet, 
what is also characteristic, Novalis soon re- 
turned to this book, and it remained his favo- 
rite reading to the end of his life. 

What distinguishes Goethe for French and 
English readers, is a property which he shares 
with his nation, — a habitual reference to inte- 
rior truth. In England and in America there 
is a respect for talent ; and, if it is exerted in 
support of any ascertained or intelligible in- 
terest or party, or in regular opposition to any, 
the public is satisfied. In France, there is even 
a greater delight in intellectual brilliancy, for 
its own sake. And, in all these countries, men 
of talent write from talent. It is enough if 
the understanding is occupied, the taste propi- 
tiated, — so many columns so many hours, filled 
in a lively and creditable way. The German 
intellect wants the French sprightliness, the 
fine practical understanding of the English, and 
the American adventure ; but it has a certain 
probity, which never rests in a superficial per- 
formance, but asks steadily. To what end? A 
German public asks for a controlling sincerity. 
Here is activity of thought; but what is it for? 
What does the man mean? Whence, whence, 
all these thoughts? 



244 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There 
must be a man behind the book; a personality 
which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the 
doctrines there set forth, and which exists to 
see and state things so, and not otherwise; 
holding things because they are things. If he 
cannot rightly express himself to-day, the same 
things subsist, and will open themselves 
to-morrow. There lies the burden on his mind 
— the burden of truth to be declared, — mere 
or less understood; and it constitutes his 
business and calling in the world, to see those 
facts through, and to make them known. 
What signifies that he trips and stammers; 
that his voice is harsh or hissing; that this 
method or his tropes are inadequate? That 
message will find method and imagery, articu- 
lation and melody. Though he were dumb, 
it would speak. If not, — if there be no such 
God's word in the man, — what care we how 
adroit, how fluent, how brilliant he is? 

It makes a great difference to the force of 
any sentence, whether there be a man behind 
it, or no. In the learned journal, in the 
influential newspaper, I discern no form ; only 
some irresponsible shadow; oftener some 
monied corporation, or some dangler, who 
hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, 
to pass for somebody. But, through every 
clause and part of speech of a right book, I 
meet the eyes of the most determined of men: 
his force and terror inundate every word: the 
commas and dashes are alive; so that the 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 245 

writing is athletic and nimble, — can go far and 
live long. 

In England and America, one may be an 
adept in the writing of a Greek or Latin poet, 
without any poetic taste or fire. That a man 
has spent years on Plato and Proclus, does not 
afford a presumption that he holds heroic 
opinions, or undervalues the fashions of his 
town. But the German nation have the most 
ridiculous good faith on these subjects: the 
student, out of the lecture-room, still broods 
on the lessons ; and the professor cannot divest 
himself of the fancy, that the truths of philos- 
ophy have some application to Berlin and 
Munich. This earnestness enables them to 
out-see men of much more talent. Hence, 
almost all the valuable distinctions which are 
current in higher conversation, have been 
derived to us from Germany. But, whilst men 
distinguished for wit and learning, in England 
and France, adopt their study and their side 
with a certain levit}'', and are not understood 
to be very deeply engaged, from grounds of 
character, to the topic or the part they 
espouse, — Goethe, the head and body of the 
German nation, does not speak from talent, 
but the truth shines through : he is very wise, 
though his talent often veils his wisdom. 
However excellent his sentence is, he has 
somewhat better in view. It awakens my 
curiosity. He has the formidable independ- 
ence which con verse* with truth gives: hear 
you, or forbear, his fact abides ; and your inter- 
est in the writer is not confined to his story. 



246 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

and he dismissed from memory, when he has 
performed his task creditably, as a baker when 
he has left his loaf; but his work is the least 
part of him. The old Eternal Genius who 
built the world has confided himself more to 
this man than to any other. I dare not say 
that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds 
from which genius has spoken. He has not 
worshipped the highest unity; he is incapable 
of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment. 
There are nobler strains in poetry than any he 
has sounded. There are writers poorer in 
talent, whose tone is purer, and more touches 
the heart. Goethe can never be dear to men. 
His is not even the devotion to pure truth; but 
to truth for the sake of culture. He has no 
aims less large than the conquest of universal 
nature, of universal truth, to be his portion; a 
man not to be bribed, nor deceived, nor over- 
awed; of a stoical self-command and self-de- 
nial, and having one test for all men, — What 
can you teach me? All possessions are valued 
by him for that only; rank, privileges, health, 
time, being itself. 

He is the type of culture, the amateur of all 
arts, and sciences, and events; artistic, but not 
artist; spiritual, but not spiritualist. There is 
nothing he had not right to know; there is no 
weapon in the army of universal genius he did 
not take into his hand, but with peremptory 
heed that he should not be for a moment pre- 
judiced by his instruments. He lays a ray of 
light under every fact, and between himself 
and his dearest property. From him nothing 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 247 

was hid, nothing withholden. The lurking- 
daemons sat to him, and the saint who saw the 
daemons; and the metaphysical elements took 
form. *' Piety itself is no aim, but only a 
means whereby, through purest inward peace, 
we may attain to highest culture." And his 
penetration of every secret of the fine arts will 
make Goethe still more statuesque. His affec- 
tions help him, like women employed by Cicero 
to worm out the secret of conspirators. 
Enmities he has none. Enemy of him you 
may be, — if so you shall teach him aught which 
your good-will cannot, — were it only what 
experience will accrue from your ruin. Enemy 
and welcome, but enemy on high terms. He 
cannot hate anybody; his time is worth too 
much. Temperamental antagonisms may be 
suffered, but like feuds of emperors, who fight 
dignifiedly across kingdoms. 

His autobiography, under the title of "Poetry 
and Truth Out of My Life," is the expression 
of the idea, — now familiar to the world through 
the German mind, but a novelty to England, 
Old and New, when that book appeared, — that 
a man exists for culture ; not for what he can 
accomplish, but for what can be accomplished 
in him. The reaction of things on the man is 
the only noteworthy result. An intellectual 
man can see himself as a third person; there- 
fore his faults and delusions .interest him 
equally with his successes. Though he wishes 
to prosper in affairs, he wishes more to know 
the history and destiny of man; whilst the 



248 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

clouds of egotists drifting about him are only 
interested in a low success. 

This idea reigns in the DichUing itiid Wahr- 
hcit, and directs the selection of the incidents; 
and nowise the external importance of events, 
tlie rank of the personages, or the bulk of 
ir.comes. Of course, the book affords slender 
materials for what would be reckoned with us 
a "Life of Goethe;" — few dates; no corres- 
pondence; no details of offices or employments;, 
no light on his marriage ; and, a period of ten 
years, that should be the most active in his life, 
after his settlement at Weimar, is sunk in 
silence. Meantime, certain love-affairs, that 
came to nothing, as people say, have the 
strangest importance: he crowds us with 
detail: — certain whimsical opinions, cosmog- 
onies, and religions of his own invention, and, 
especially his relations to remarkable minds, 
and to critical epochs of thought: — these he 
magnifies. His "Daily and Yearly Journal," 
his "Italian Travels," his "Campaign in 
France," and the historical part of his "Theory 
of Colors," have the same interest. In the 
last, he rapidly notices Kepler, Roger Bacon, 
Galileo, Newton, Voltaire, etc. ; and the charm 
of this portion of the book consists in the 
simplest statement of the relation betwixt these 
grandees of European scientific history and 
himself ; the mere drawing of the lines from 
Goethe to Kepler, from Goethe to Bacon, from 
Goethe to Newton. The drawing of the line 
is for the time and person, a solution of the 
formidable problem, and gives pleasure when 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 249 

Iphig^enia and Faust do not, without any cost 
of invention comparable to that of Iphigenia 
and Faust. 

This lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was 
it that he knew too much, that his sight was 
microscopic, and interfered with the just per- 
spective, the seeing of the whole? He is frag- 
mentary; a writer of occasional poems, and of 
an encyclopaedia of sentences. When he sits 
down to write a drama or a tale, he collects 
and sorts his observations from a hundred 
sides, and combines them into the body as fitly 
as he can. A great deal refuses to incorporate : 
this he adds loosely, as letters, of the parties, 
leaves from their journals, or the like. A 
great deal still is left that will not find any 
place. This the bookbinder alone can give 
any cohesion to: and, hence, notwithstanding 
the looseness of many of his works, we have 
volumes of detached paragraphs, aphorisms, 
xenien, etc. 

I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew 
out of the calculations of self-culture. It was 
the infirmity of an admirable scholar, who 
loved the world out of gratitude; who knew 
where libraries, galleries, architecture, labora^ 
tories, savants, and leisure, were to be had, 
and who did not quite trust the compensations 
of poverty and nakedness. Socrates loved 
Athens; Montaigne, Paris; and Madame de 
Stael said, she was only vulnerable on that side 
(namely, of Paris). It has its favorable aspect. 
All the geniuses are usually so ill-assorted 
and sickly, that one is ever wishing them 



250 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

somewhere else. We seldom see anybody who 
is not uneasy or afraid to live. There is a 
slight blush of shame on the cheek of good 
men and aspiring men, and a spice of carica- 
ture. But this man was entirely at home and 
happy in his century and the world. None 
was so fit to live, or more heartily enjoyed the 
game. In this aim of culture, which is the 
genius of his works, is their power. The idea 
of absolute, eternal truth, without reference to 
my own enlargement by it, is higher. The 
surrender to the torrent, of poetic inspiration 
is higher ; but compared with any motives on 
which books are written in England and 
America, this is very truth, and has the power 
to inspire which belongs to truth. Thus has 
he brought back to a book some of its ancient 
might and dignity. 

Goethe, coming into an over- civilized time 
and country, when original talent was oppressed 
under the load of books, and mechanical aux- 
iliaries, and the distracting variety of claims, 
taught men how to dispose of this mountainous 
miscellany, and make it subservient. I join 
Napoleon with him, as being both representa- 
tives of the impatience and reaction of nature 
against the morgue of conventions, — two stern 
realists, who, with their scholars, have severally 
set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and 
seeming, for this time, and for all time. This 
cheerful laborer, with no external popularity 
or provocation, drawing his motive and his 
plan from his own breast, tasked himself with 
stints for a giant, and, without relaxation or 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 251 

rest, except by alternating his pursuits, 
worked on for eighty years with the steadiness 
of his first zeal. 

It is the last lesson of modern science, that 
the highest simplicity of structure is produced, 
not by few elements, but by the highest com- 
plexity. Man is the most composite of all crea- 
tures: the wheel-insect, volvox globator, is at 
the other extreme. We shall learn to draw 
rents and revenues from the immense patri- 
mony of the old and recent ages. Goethe 
teaches courage, and the equivalence of all 
times: that the disadvantages ,of any epoch 
exist only to the faint-hearted. Genius hovers 
with his sunshine and music close by the dark- 
est and deafest eras. No mortgage, no 
attainder, will hold on men or hours. The 
world is young ; the former great men call to 
us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, 
to unite again the heavens and the earthly 
world. The secret of genius is to suffer no 
fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we 
know ; in the high refinement of modern life, 
in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact 
good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, 
last, midst, and without end, to honor every 
truth by use. 



THE END. 



WORKS OF ELLA WHEELER WILCOX (Continued) 

HOW SALVATOR WON AND OTHER POEMS. 12mo, 

cloth, $1.00. Presentation Edition — white vellum, gold 
top, $1.50. Presentation Edition— half calf, gold top, 
$2.50. 

A choice collection of recitations, specially compiled for read- 
ers and impersonators. 

"Her name is a household word. Her great power lies in depict- 
ing human emotions ; and in handling that grandest of all passions 
—love— she wields the pen of a master."- T^e Saturday Record. 

CUSTER AND OTHER POEMS. Handsomely illustrated. 
12mo, cloth, $1.00. Presentation Edition — white vellum, 
gold top. $1.50. Presentation Edition— half calf, gold 
top, $2.50. 

A grand epic of the exploits and massacre of the immortal 
Custer. 

*One cannot help gaining new impetus for the spiritual exist- 
ence from coming in contact, mentally, with such ideal sentiments 
and emotions as this rarely gifted poetess voices in magnificent 
verse."— iJjiirersai Truth. 

AN ERRING WOMAN'S LOVE. 12mo. cloth. $1.00. 
Presentation Edition — white vellum, gold top, $1.50. 
Presentation Edition — half calf, gold top, $2.50. 

"Power and pathos characterize this magnificent poem. A 
deep understanding of life and an intense sympathy are beauti- 
fully expressed."— Triftune. 

MEN, WOMEN AND EMOTIONS. (Prose.) 12mo, heavy 
enameled paper cover, 50 cents ; English cloth, $1.00. 
A skillful analysis of social habits, customs and follies. 
"Her fame has reached all parts of the world, and her popular- 

ity seems to grow with each succeeding year.'^— American Newsman^ 

THE BEAUTIFUL LAND OF NOD. (Poems, songs and 

stories.) With over sixty original illustrations. Quarto. 

cloth, $1.00. 

The delight of the nursery. A charming mother's book. 

"The foremost baby's book of the world."— iV^ety Orleans 
Picayune. 

PRESENTATION SETS. Poems of Passion, Maurine, 
Poems of Pleasure, How Salvator Won, and Custer, are 
supplied in sets of 3, 4. or 5 titles, as may be desired, in 
neat boxes, without extra charge. 

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX'S WORKS are for sale by leading book- 
sellers everywhere, or will be sent postpaid on receipt of price by 
the Publishers. 

W, B, CONKEY COMPANY, Chicago 



IS. I CoNKEY GoiQPHurs Fdbligbtions 

COMPLETE LIST OF THE POETIC AND PROSE 

WORKS OF 

Ella Wheeler Wilcox 



POEMS OP PASSION. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. Presentation 
Edition— white vellum, gold top. $1.50. Presentation 
Edition— half calf, gold top, $2.50. 

POEMS OF PASSION. Quarto, cloth. Illustrated 
Edition, $1.50. 

POEMS OF PASSION. Pocket Edition, Illustrated— 16mo, 
cloth, 75 cents; full morocco, gold edges, $2.50. 
Human nature is less of a mystery after the reading of this book. 
*'0nly a woman of genias could produce such a remarkable 

\roilsi."— Illustrated London News. 

MAURINE AND OTHER POEMS. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. 
Presentation Edition — white vellum, gold top, $1.50. 
Presentation Edition — half calf, gold top, $2.50. 
Beautiful thoughts and healthy inspiration in every line. 
"Maurine is an ideal poem about a perfect woman,"— Tfce South, 

POEMS OF PLEASURE. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. Presenta- 
tion Edition — white vellum, gold top, $1.50. Presenta- 
tion Edition — half calf, gold top, $2.50. 
These poems make life doubly sweet and cheerful. 
"Mrs. Wilcox is an artist with a touch that reminds one of 

Lord Byron's impassionate strains."— Pans Register. 

THREE WOMEN. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. Presentation 
Edition — art binding, gold top, boxed, $1.50. 
Her [latest and greatest poem. This marvelous narrative of 

thrilling interest depicts the lives of three good and beautiful 

women in every phase of weakness^ passion, pride, love, sympathy 

and tenderness. 

AN AMBITIOUS MAN. (Prose.) 12mo, cloth, $1.00. 

♦'Vivid realism stands forth from every page of this fascinating 
hook.''— Every Day, 



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Holmes 

11. Bacon's Essays Bacon 

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15. Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush 

Maclaren 

14. Black Beauty Sewall 

16. Blitbedale Romance.. Hawthorne 

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Prince of the House of David 

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Kab and His Friends. . . Brown 
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Rollo in Geneva Abbott 

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Three Men in a Boat. .Jerome 
Through the Looking Glass 

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Twice Told Tales.. Hawthorne 

Uncle Tom's Cabin Stow© 

Vicar of Wakefield. .Goldsmith 

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